Broken Website

Don't you just hate it when you break something when trying to carry out some maintenance or clean-up. Two days back I shot myself in the foot and didn't even realise it till today when I came to post on my weblog after six days.

As I have mentioned earlier, I was under attack by Spambots who posting comments with links to porn sites on my weblog. I thought I had taken care of that. But some smart guy outfoxed me by putting a trackback to my website. When I went to delete it, I inadvertently deleted the entire comments folder (place holder) in my weblog (CoreBlog2.0.8b running on Plone 2.5.1). When I posted a new blog entry earlier today, I found out that I could save the entry but it would give me an error that related comments. The error looked like:

Exception Type
KeyError
Exception Value
'comments' 

I am not a programming guy and I tried very hard to read the code all over the place to understand and find out if I had deleted some key file. I even compared it with my other website and did not find anything wrong there. I spent almost 3 hours trying to find out what was wrong. I even though about raising a ticket with the CoreBlog team and re-installing the CoreBlog software. But that would have been done later today when I reached home. Till that time, my website would be partially inaccessible and I didn't like the sound of it.

So when I again compared my working website and this one, I focused my attention to the weblog object inside the Plone website. I noticed that the comments object is missing from there. I knew that it was a folder, but whenever I tried to add from the ZMI, all I could do was add a weblog entry with the name comments. Although that was fixing the website, it was not the optimum solution that I was looking for. Next thing I did was to check the Portal Types section and saw that the only allowed object type under Coreblog was a new CoreBlog Entry. I added CoreBlogCommentFolder as an allowed type and then came back to the weblog on Plone (it does not work through ZMI though) and added a CoreBlogCommentFolder.

This has fixed my problem and brought my website back up till the time I break it again.