auslfe.portlet.multimedia 0.2.0

A simple Plone multimedia Portlet with additional optional features

Documentation

Yet another multimedia/dynamic portlet for Plone that display images.

Why you can like this instead of other? Because it works with Javascript disabled (with an eye onto the Italian Accessibility Act) and is tested to work behind reverse-proxy (like Varnish).

How to use

The main information you must provide to the portlet is a Plone collection. The collection is used to retrieve all image-like contents from it. You can freely configure the collection to return also other content, but only ones marked as “image-able” are used (technically speaking: it also filter only contents that provides IImageContent, like “Image” and “News Item” content type already do).

From the target collection is also used the “Number of items” field, to show in the portlet only a limited number of images.

The “Limit Search Results” field is not directly used by this portlet, but change the collection behaviour. Enabling the client random feature with this check selected will only reorder a limited set of images.

Performance

What scare us about other Javascript-live multimedia portlet (besides accessibility) is the massive use of AJAX call to the server. This can lead to two problems:

• too many request (and low performance)

• random feature could work badly with cache in front of Plone

For this reason this portlet will not query every xyz seconds the server, but simply get from the server all the images, the randomly reload it client side.

The auto-reload feature can be disabled if you don’t like it. You still have a random image set at page load time.

Be aware: CSS styles

Default Plone columns are narrow. Installing this will make your portlet min width a little bigger, enough for host 2 images for every row.

TODO

• Tests on Plone 4: there is the new SunBurst Theme and jQuery 1.4.

Credits

Developed with the support of Azienda USL Ferrara; Azienda USL Ferrara supports the PloneGov initiative.

Authors

This product was developed by RedTurtle Technology team.

Changelog

0.2.0 (2010-06-09)

• first public release (on pypi)

• moved portlet specific CSS inside the product [keul]

• added Javascript for client-side randomization (needed for maintain random images with Varnish) [keul]

• internationalization support [keul]

• in the portlet management, added the portlet title to every portlet [keul]

• added a feature for client side random reload [keul]

0.1.0 (2010-06-09)

• initial release