collective.navigationtoggle 0.3.0

Expand/collapse feature for specific Plone navigation entries, in an unobtrusive way

Table of contents

• Introduction

  • When you will like this?

  • What will change

• Detailed documentation

  • Basic configuration

  • Manually configuration for your themes

  • Styles

  • Not standard navigation (…or portlet… or whatever you want)

  • Effects

• TODO

• Versions/Dependencies

  • Browsers

  • Plone

  • Dependencies

• Other products

• Credits

• Authors

• Changelog

  • 0.3.0 (2011-06-07)

  • 0.2.1 (2010-07-09)

  • 0.2.0 (2010-04-11)

  • 0.1.0 (2010-04-06)

Introduction

Scope 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 you will like 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 in your information architecture.

What will change

Make possible that special navigation links will no more move the user to 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, elements marked with “Exclude from navigation” and unwanted type from the metaTypesNotToList property will be excluded.

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.

Detailed documentation

Basic configuration

Use the Plone registry to configure which navigation links will be expanded.

Just privide a list of elements, where every element can be:

• existing suffix of an href attribute for a link (like “/folder/foo”)

• a valid jQuery selector

See next section for more technical informations.

Manually configuration for your themes

If you don’t want to use the Plone UI, you can add additional configuration manually; you can 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 example 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.

Instead of giving the link URL path, you can also provide a jQuery selector expression:

jQuery.collective_navigationtoggle.toggle_elements.push(".portletNavigationTree a.markedLink");

Be aware that, with this kins of configuration, the “portletNavigationTree” search filter is not included (if you want it, you must provide it yourself).

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.

The generated substructure is a copy of the main strucutre given by Plone, but a “cnavGenerated” class is added to it.

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

Not standard navigation (…or portlet… or whatever you want)

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.

As the code works almost client side, you can also use it in portlets that are not standard navigation. Theoretically you can use it with something that is not even a portlet!

Whay you need is to change those configuration parameter:

toggleContainerClass

The class that the navigation structure must provide. Only used if you check for link URL path. You can also null this.

Default is portletNavigationTree.

listType

The HTML element structure that the link must be contained into. This is important as is taken and cloned when the link is expanded.

Default is ul

listItem

As above, but this is the HTML list item that will be checked and used.

Default is li

For example, you can write:

jQuery.collective_navigationtoggle.toggleContainerClass = 'portletCollection';
jQuery.collective_navigationtoggle.listType = 'dl';
jQuery.collective_navigationtoggle.listItem = 'dt';
jQuery.collective_navigationtoggle.toggle_elements.push("/my/path");

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

• Internationalization

• Change global configuration settings to be different for every navigation

• More configuration from Plone UI

Versions/Dependencies

Browsers

• Firefox 3.6

• Google Chrome 5

• Opera 10

• Safari 5

• Internet Explorer 8

Plone

• Plone 3.3 (classic Plone theme)

• Plone 4.0 (classic Plone theme and Sunburst)

Dependencies

• simplejson (if using Plone 3)

• jQuery 1.3 or better

• plone.app.registry

Other products

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

Credits

Developed with the support of:

• S. Anna Hospital, Ferrara

  

• Azienda USL Ferrara

  

All of them supports the PloneGov initiative.

Authors

This product was developed by RedTurtle Technology team.

Changelog

0.3.0 (2011-06-07)

• you can now use more general jQuery selector instead of simple URL parts [keul]

• do not show types that are in list of unwanted types in navigation [keul]

• collective.navigationtoggle.txt was empty [keul]

• JSLint cleanup [keul]

• code is more general, and new properties likes toggleContainerClass, listType and listItem has been added. The code now can be used to simulate navigators also with not portlet navigator structures [keul]

• added the uninstall GS step [keul]

• fixed the simplejson dependency correctly, only if with Python < 2.6 [keul]

• links selectors can be added through Plone UI [keul]

0.2.1 (2010-07-09)

• fixed a bug when fast double-click on opened elements (close #1) [keul]

• much better Sunburst support (and other themes, in general), now checking also for “contenttype-xx” and “state-xx” CSS classes on links [keul]

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]

• do 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