These are just some quick and dirty installation instructions for collective.tin, collective.lead, collective.mercury etc. What I really want to do is to use SQL content types within Plone 3.0 in a Zope3-ish way.

Unfortunately, I could not find information on how to install the collective.* packages, so here's my hack:

1. Install SQLAlchemy 0.4.x. Straightforward, since it's an egg. Just remember to use the same python that is used to run Zope/Plone. If you're on a Mac, for example, set the $PATH variable so it finds your Plone package's python executable first (on OSX, Plone3, that is: /Applications/Plone-3.x/Python-2.4.x/python2.4)
   The package is then installed in Python-2.4.x/lib/site-packages of your Plone directory.
2. Start with the SVN version of collective.lead. It's a Python egg, so just do python setup.py install. Again, remember to use the correct python execs.
3. Now, checkout collective.mercury and collective.tin from SVN. Put the directories trunk/collective/tin and trunk/collective/mercury to the collective.lead-directory that was created by the python egg installation. It's important to put it there, otherwise my python could not find it. Not sure how to do this in a proper way...
4. Then, basically follow the steps in the tutorial. Important:
5. Create the products directory (eg. Timesheets). Then, change into the Plone instance directory, that is, the directory just above Products.
6. Start the Zope debug server from within the very same directory and import codegen from collective.mercury, like described in the tutorial. If you're on MySQL, use Annotate=False, as it only works in PostgreSQL.

ALL DONE! Easy if you know how. Not so easy without any documentation...