auslfe.portlet.multimedia 0.2.1

A simple Plone multimedia Portlet with additional optional features

Documentation

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

Why you can want 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 the portlet looks like on AUSL web site

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.

Translations

When using client side reload feature, the user can (for accessibility reason) stop and restart the auto-reload task.

The portlet title will display an help message. To add additional translation you are able to not change the product source.

Just add something like this in one of your Javascript source:

jQuery.auslfe_multimedia = {
    i18n: {
        xx: {
            stopReload: '"Click to stop auto-reload" in xx language',
            restartReload: '"Click to restart auto-reload" in xx language'
        }
    }
};

Change xx above with the 2-letters code of your language and customize other strings. Language loaded is taken from the language of the site (for any problem, fallback on english).

TODO

• Configure client reload timeout from portlet UI (now you can still, customizing the timeout var in Javascript).

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

0.2.1 (2010-09-21)

• integrated imagesLoaded jQuery plugin [keul]

• fixed a bug (thanks to the plugin above): sometimes the image was not “faded-in” correctly [keul]

• changed custom event name to “portletRefresh” [keul]

• minor accessibility fix: click on the portlet title stop/start client images reload, if enabled [keul]

• portlet title in Plone UI was always in italian language: fixed [keul]

• template fix, now working also on different themes (and with more than two images for row) [keul]

• removed the min-width CSS style, leave this to user Plone theme [keul]

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