Products.Doormat 0.3

Adds a doormat viewlet and installs it in the Plone footer. The links in the doormat are manageable as content.

Introduction

A doormat is a large collection of links which are presented in a structured way. One example is the current plone.org, where the div#sitemap at the bottom is actually an ordered collection of internal and external links, with sections called “Downloads”, “Documentation”, “Developers”, “Plone foundation” and “Support”. See more examples of doormats.

This product adds a couple of content types (Archetypes), which are used to create a structure which is used for generating a doormat. A viewlet on this doormat is placed in the Plone footer. The links in the Doormat are managed as content, making the Doormat more flexible than a sitemap. It’s also possible to add external links.

Getting started

After installing the product in your site, you can add a “Doormat” item to your Plone site. Inside it, you can create a hierarchical structure of Columns, Sections and links (both internal and external).

The Doormat will look like this, schematically:

+-- Doormat -----------------------------------------+
|                                                    |
|  +-- Column 1 ----------+  + Column 2 -----------+ |
|  |                      |  |                     | |
|  |  +-- Section 1 ----+ |  | +-- Section 1 ----+ | |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | | |
|  |  |  +-- Link 1 --+ | |  | |  +-- Link 1 --+ | | |
|  |  |  +------------+ | |  | |  +------------+ | | |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | | |
|  |  |  +-- Link 2 --+ | |  | |  +-- Link 2 --+ | | |
|  |  |  +------------+ | |  | |  +------------+ | | |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | | |
|  |  +-----------------+ |  | +-----------------+ | |
|  |                      |  |                     | |
|  +----------------------+  +---------------------+ |
|                                                    |
+----------------------------------------------------+

And in real life:

Note that the product adds an extra hierarchical layer compared to the plone.org doormat: it adds a Column, which can contain more than one Section. An example using this structure is the Oosterpoort, which actually is the product’s predecessor.

Simple configuration

You’ll probably want to exclude the doormat object from navigation using the “Settings” tab. (This was not yet done when the above screenshot was taken.)

There’s a field showTitle on the folderish types (Doormat, Column and Section) which allows content managers to decide if the item’s title should be displayed in the doormat.

More advanced configuration and styling

This section is intended for integrators and/or developers who would like to customize the way the doormat is rendered in more detail.

Moving the doormat

By default, the default doormat viewlet (doormat.footer) is placed in the plone.portalfooter viewlet manager. It’s easy to modify this in an add-on product, so the doormat will display below the global navigation (portal tabs), or anywhere else in the site.

Displaying the doormat without the extra div elements

The default viewlet renders the doormat inside Plone’s default footer elements, so it blends in with Plone 4’s default Sunburst Theme:

<div class="row">
  <div class="cell width-full position-0" >
    <div id="doormat-container" />
  </div>
</div>

Using the doormat.footer.bare viewlet will omit the two outermost <div>’s. This may be handy when using the doormat in a different theme, or in a customized layout. You can hide the default viewlet and enable the bare version through @@manage-viewlets, or by adding a customized viewlets.xml to the product you’re developing.

Caveats

The viewlet does a catalog lookup for the Doormat portal type. If you have more than one object of this type (nothing stops you), it will use the oldest one.

Dependencies / Requirements

The product works on:

• Plone 3

• Plone 4

Credits

This product was sponsored by GroningerForum.

Changelog

0.3 (2010-07-19)

• Remove empty skins/ folders doormat_styles/ and doormat_templates/ (fixes http://plone.org/products/doormat/issues/4: Skin dirs missing from egg)

• Added viewlet doormat.footer.bare to display the doormat without the div.row and div.cell wrapping.

0.2 (2010-06-11)

• Add viewlet to browser layer (fixes http://plone.org/products/doormat/issues/3: Uninstall cleanly)

0.1.1 (2010-06-09)

• added locales/NOTEMPTY.txt to ensure locales/ is added to egg. This fixes #1 (http://plone.org/products/doormat/issues/1)

• updated doc

0.1 (2010-06-08)

Initial release

To do

• Add some sort of caching for getDoormatData and getDoormatTitle methods, or for the entire viewlet. Or at least get an idea of how expensive they are. Currently the viewlet computes the whole doormat each time it is rendered.

• Correctly set internal / external class on link anchors.