Fixing "CMFPlone Product is Broken" Error on Plone 3.1.7-1 on Debian

For those of you who run Plone on Debian systems, you have probably noticed that the Plone packages have been removed from Testing and Unstable.  This is in preparation for the Plone 4 release and because the Plone 3 packages have some bugs that are difficult to fix.  In the meantime, if you have Plone installed it will continue to function correctly.  However, near the end of January, their was an automatic update that broke Plone.  Because Plone has been officially removed, there were no Debian bugs to track this problem.  The update in question was the python-imaging package, which was updated from python-imaging_1.1.7-1 to python-imaging_1.1.7-1+b1.  Even though this is a very minor rebuild, it makes Zope and Plone very unhappy.

When the newer version of python-imaging is installed, all the Plone sites break with an error message stating that "This object from the CMFPlone product is broken!"

In addition, error messages referencing the Python Image Library were listed in /var/log/zope2.10/plone-site/event.log:

Warning: no Python Imaging Libraries (PIL) found.Archetypes based ImageField's don't scale if neccessary.

ImportError: No module named PIL

Downgrading python-imaging fixes the problem.  If you have previously had Plone functioning, you most likely have an older version of python-imaging stored in your /var/cache/apt/archives directory.  Running the following command as root should fix the problem:

dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/python-imaging_1.1.7-1_amd64.deb

If you are not running amd64, you will need to substitute this with your architecture.  If you don't have the file, you can probably find an archived copy online, or you can send me an email at soren@sbtechsolutions.biz and I will email you the amd64 deb.

Now that you have the correct Python Imaging file, restart Zope and everything should be back to normal.

service zope2.10 restart