collective.microdata.core 0.1

Core package for Plone microdata support

Table of contents

• Introduction

• How to use

  • The microdata vocabulary

  • The schema.org implementation

• How to extend

  • From contents

  • From catalog

• Support for folder content listing views

• Testing your microdata

• Final notes

• Changelog

Introduction

This product is designed for adding microdata support to your Plone contents.

How to use

This package simply provides raw support, not really useful on his own. It is intended to be extended by 3rd party projects that want provide microdata support for Plone.

One complete implementation of all instruction below is collective.microdata.event.

The microdata vocabulary

Every content type that wanna provide microdata informations needs to provide an adapter for the IMicrodataVocabulary interface. This interface is limited to a single information: an URI to a microdata vocabulary.

Microdata vocabulary are standardized outside HTML 5 specifications, so is possible to have different families of vocabularies. You can also invent your own.

The schema.org implementation

Nowadays the most promising implementation of microdata is the one defined at schema.org so this package is supporting it. This is done providing the most-generic type defined: the Thing type.

This is automatically done for all Plone content types and catalog objects (for catalog: a new catalog metadata microdata_itemtype will be added to your catalog, saving there the most specific microdata vocabulary URL found).

This is done providing adapters for ISchemaOrgThing interface (that extends IMicrodataVocabulary).

Again: knowing that all your Plone content types are “things” is not very funny, and not a real step forward.

How to extend

From contents

To get microdata information from a content types, your product must provide his own implementation for the IMicrodataVocabulary:

<adapter for="your.products.content.IType"
         provides="collective.microdata.core.interfaces.IMicrodataVocabulary"
         factory=".adapter.YourTypeMicrodataProvider" />

Then you need to provide the adapter:

class YourTypeMicrodataProvider(object):
implements(IYourMicrodataVocabulary)

def __init__(self, content):
    self.microdata_vocabulary = 'http://your.microdata.uri'
    # now get data from the content
    self.microdata_data1 = ...

Then your content’s view must obtain the microdata adapter you defined:

class YourTypeView(BrowserView):

    ...

    def microdata(self):
        return IMicrodataVocabulary(self.context)

Finally your view template must use microdata information:

...
<article metal:fill-slot="main"
         tal:define="microdata view/microdata"
         itemscope="itemscope"
         tal:attributes="itemtype microdata/microdata_vocabulary">
...

From catalog

The portal catalog microdata_itemtype column will automatically store the content microdata vocabulary URL. Default value is the “Thing” URL (http://schema.org/Thing) but as soon as you provide a more specific adapter, this URL will be replaced with the new ones.

There’s an adapter for getting raw Thing microdata from a catalog brain from all Plone content types, but your 3rd party content type must also provide a more specific ones:

<adapter for="Products.ZCatalog.interfaces.ICatalogBrain"
         provides="collective.microdata.core.interfaces.IMicrodataVocabulary"
         factory=".adapter.YourTypeMicrodataBrainProvider"
         name="http://your.microdata.uri" />

Then you need to provide the adapter:

class YourTypeMicrodataBrainProvider(object):
implements(IYourMicrodataVocabulary)

def __init__(self, brain):
    self.microdata_vocabulary = 'http://your.microdata.uri'
    # now get data from the cataloged content
    self.microdata_data1 = ...

Support for folder content listing views

If you want to provide microdata information also in folder content views (so displaying multiple microdata objects in a single page), you could like to install collective.microdata.contentlisting.

See it’s documentation for further information on how to use this in you product.

Testing your microdata

This product also include a JavaScript tester microdata tool called Microdata Tool (a modified ones, just to fix some crappy Sunburst CSS rules).

To enable it while testing your site, just run the testing Generic Setup profile from your site_setup tool.

This will enable the JavaScript tester in every page.

Hint: duration checker seems not working properly.

Final notes

Providing microdata doesn’t ensure that search engines will use it.

Changelog

0.1 (2012-09-08)

• Initial release