Sometimes there are changes you can't upstream because they are project specific and also because they can't be override in a simple way. I take a current use case I have: change the default values of table plugin from collective.ckeditor.
By default the table add form of ckeditor is 500 pixels wide. A customer want to change that default behavior for good reason: He always use 100% instead and this is boring to have bad default values.
So first as developer you can checkout the current collective.ckeditor:
git clone git://github.com/collective/collective.ckeditor.git
Try to find which files you have to change. In our case
- collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/_source/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js
- collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js
Do the modification and then call the command from the project folder:
git diff --no-prefix > table-default.diff
Do not forget the --no-prefix option or your patch will not usable. Now you have your patch. You need to deploy it on your project. Because we use buildout to deploy our project here is a simple example ckeditor-patch.cfg:
[buildout]
extends=http://dist.plone.org/release/4.1-latest/versions.cfg
parts =
instance
patch-ckeditor
[instance]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
user = admin:admin
eggs=
Plone
collective.ckeditor
zcml =
collective.ckeditor
[patch-ckeditor]
recipe = collective.recipe.patch
egg = collective.ckeditor
patches = table-default.diff
This buildout will install Plone with collective.ckeditor and apply the our patch on it. Here is the console output:
$ bin/buildout -c test-patch.cfg Installing instance. Getting distribution for 'collective.ckeditor'. warning: no previously-included files matching '*pyc' found anywhere in distribution Got collective.ckeditor 3.6.2. Generated script '/Users/toutpt/myproject/bin/copy_ckeditor_code'. Installing patch-ckeditor. patch: reading patch /Users/toutpt/myproject/table-default.diff patch: total files: 2 total hunks: 2 patch: in /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg... patch: processing 1/2: /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg/collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/_source/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js patch: successfully patched /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg/collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/_source/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js patch: processing 2/2: /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg/collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js patch: successfully patched /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg/collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js
And if you launch again the buildout:
$ bin/buildout -c ckeditor-patch.cfg Installing instance. Installing patch-ckeditor. patch: reading patch /Users/toutpt/myproject/table-default.diff patch: total files: 2 total hunks: 2 patch: in /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg... patch: processing 1/2: /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg/collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/_source/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js patch: already patched /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg/collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/_source/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js patch: processing 2/2: /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg/collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js patch: already patched /Users/toutpt/.buildout/installed_eggs/collective.ckeditor-3.6.2-py2.6.egg/collective/ckeditor/browser/ckeditor/plugins/table/dialogs/table.js
So now you have a working Zope instance with Plone and a patched CKEditor. Every one should be happy!
Warning 1: Like as you can see if you are using shared eggs repository, your patch will be applied for all projects using this egg.
Warning 2: Plugins are fetched on demand (ajax) and there is 24 hours of browser cache. So it means you have to empty your browser cache when you are making changes to javascripts or wait 24 hours. Headers of the table.js response which show this browser cache:
Cache-Control:public,max-age=86400 Content-Length:8733 Content-Type:application/javascript Date:Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:07:18 GMT Expires:Wed, 13 Jun 2012 09:07:18 GMT Last-Modified:Tue, 12 Jun 2012 08:47:06 GMT