collective.navigationtoggle 0.2.0

Make possible to expand/collapse specific Plone navigation entries in a very unobtrusive way

Table of contents

• Documentation

  • When I will need this?

  • What will change

  • How to use

  • Styles

  • Effects

• TODO

• Versions/Dependencies

  • Browsers

  • Plone

  • Dependencies

• Other products

• Changelog

  • 0.2.0 (2010-04-11)

  • 0.1.0 (2010-04-06)

Documentation

Target of this product is to make possible an expand/collapse feature in Plone navigation(s) portlet without any modification to the navigation code itself, or any needs to override its features.

This product is not a new navigation portlet, is just a Javascript add-on that rely on native Plone’s jQuery support.

When I will need this?

The collective.navigationtoggle is useful when your Plone site needs (not much) special handling of navigation elements. Sometimes your site structure is someway like this:

ROOT
|
|_ FolderWhatever
\_ NotImportantFolder
   |
   |_ ImportantFolder1
   ...
   \_ ImportantFolderN

If you configure your navigation portlet on the site root, users must click on the NotImportantFolder and reload the whole page to reach the ImportantFolder’s section. The site at the NotImportantFolder level is not useful… maybe you only give a folder_listing view or a default page that only say “Welcome to an important area of the site, please visit the subsection you are looking for…”.

For the user experience the first click is only a waste of time. What you are looking for can be a client side effect that expand/collapse the folder in the navigation. The NotImportantFolder itself is not seen as a real content.

What will change

Make possible that special navigation links will no more move the user the the target section but simply shows in the navigation itself all subsections (so the navigation seems like the user really moved to the target folder). A second click will collapse the section. Default page in a folder and elements marked with “Exclude from navigation” are skipped.

The script try to simulate best at possible a normal portlet navigation behaviour.

The code keeps in mind graceful degradation. Browser without javascript enabled will simply use basic Plone navigation features.

How to use

Right now this is a product targeted on developers. You must provide a very simple Javascript script to use and configure it.

You must add additional Javascript source(s) like this:

jQuery.collective_navigationtoggle.toggle_elements.push("/foo1/foo2");

Where “/foo1/foo2” can be an existing suffix of an href attribute for a link. Only link inside navigation portlet are checked (looking for “portletNavigationTree” class).

So, a link like this (if inside a navigation portlet) is “hit” and magically handled:

<a href="http://plonehost/foo/foo1/foo2">

This because the href ends with one of the elements found inside toggle_elements.

Another possible configuration:

jQuery.collective_navigationtoggle.toggle_elements.push("/foo1/foo2");
jQuery.collective_navigationtoggle.toggle_elements.push("/foo1/foo2/foo3");

This time the “foo3” folder is inside the “foo2” and can be possible that the last link is not available at load page time (because for exampe we are still in the Plone root). However collective.navigationtoggle perform the binding of expand/collapse action also for not-yet-loaded elements.

Please, do not include the “/plonesiteid” part in your path or you will have problems when you put Apache in front of Zope.

Whatever configuration you wrote, you must include you Javascript(s) file inside portal_javascript tool after the collective.navigationtoggle.js. Here an example of a Generic Setup import steps for your Javascript:

<javascript cacheable="True"
         compression="safe"
         cookable="True"
         enabled="True"
         id="my-configuration-javascript-load-path.js"
         insert-after="++resource++collective.navigationtoggle.js"
         inline="False" />

Styles

This products dinamically adds two new possible CSS classes to <li> elements that contains links that match the configuration.

Class “cnavClosed” is added when a special navigation elements is shown on the page and when you close a subtree. When a subsection is open, the class “cnavOpen” is added to the same element.

You can (but this product will don’t) rely on those classes to give additional styles effects in your Plone theme.

This products may also works on non-standard navigation HTML structure (as the generations on subelement is done cloning existings node from the same navigation portlet) but some assumptions are done.

Effects

The product can enable for you a graphical effect when you expand/collapse items. This is disabled by default.

To enable it you must change another plugin var:

jQuery.collective_navigationtoggle.slide_animation = 300;

The value you put there is the time (in millisec) used for the slideDown and slideUp jQuery’s effect.

Simply put it to 0 again (the default) to disable effect.

TODO

• Give a Plone (or at least ZMI) UI for non-developer users, for TTW configuration

• Need more love for being more compatible with Plone 4 Sunburst Theme

• A clean uninstall GS step

• Make all this a jQuery plugin

Versions/Dependencies

Browsers

• Firefox 3.6.3

• Google Chrome 5.0beta

• Opera 10.10

• Safari 4.0.5

• Internet Explorer 8.0

Plone

• Plone 3.3

• Plone 4.0 (visual result with Sunburst Theme is not the best)

Dependencies

• simplejson (if using Plone 3)

• jQuery 1.3 or better

Other products

If you need a complete expand/collapse navigation feature this product can be not enough; so take a look to collective.portlet.explore.

Changelog

0.2.0 (2010-04-11)

• query_subelement view documentation was incomplete [keul]

• when querying empty folder, do not prevent (in facts: simulate) browser default action [keul]

• prevent browser cache (mainly know Internet Explorer problem) [keul]

• dot not always display the content’s image icon (sometimes users don’t see them in navigation) [keul]

• now every element node cache its subtree, so AJAX call is performed only once (can be disabled) [keul]

• added dependency on simplejson for formatting server responses [keul]

• added minimal Plone 4.0 compatibility (UI result is not perfect) [keul]

• added a simple slide up/down effect (disabled by default) [keul]

0.1.0 (2010-04-06)

• initial release