derico.blicca.promoblock

A Promo block for the Aurora editor in Plone Blicca. Blicca is the former Plone Classic UI. The block renders a promo card with a kicker, a title, a description, an optional image and up to two calls to action, or makes the whole card one link. Everything on the card is written by the author in the sidebar. Nothing is pulled from another content item.

Typical uses:

• a call to action at the end of a page ("Get in touch", "Book a demo");
• a highlighted announcement with a picture beside the text;
• a card linking to a campaign page, with a kicker above the headline.

The block needs plone.blicca.auroraeditor, which brings the Aurora editor to Blicca. Its editor half is also a plain Aurora block package, @derico/aurora-promo-block, that can be used in an Aurora frontend directly, see Using the block in Aurora.

Features

• Authored content. Kicker, title, description, image, two actions and a card link, all written in the sidebar. Nothing is required, so a half-finished promo can be saved and published.
• Image left, right or above. With an image, the card is two columns with the image on the chosen side. Without one, or below a width of 34rem, the card stacks and centres.
• Two actions, each a button or a link. Each action has a label, a link and a style. Links can be site content picked from the browser, or a typed URL, mailto: or tel: address.
• Card link. If no action has a label, a single link makes the whole card clickable.
• Responsive images. Only the reference to the image is stored. The public page serves the picture variant that fits the block width and the placement, with srcset and sizes, computed on every load. An AVIF alternative is included when the host's plone.namedfile supports it. A rescaled or deleted picture never leaves a broken <img> behind.
• Honest editor preview. The canvas shows which fields are still empty and explains anything the author typed that will not render, such as an action with a label but no link.
• One markup, one stylesheet for the public page, the editor canvas and an Aurora frontend.
• Themeable through nineteen --promo-* CSS custom properties.
• Block width and background colour come from the editor's regular block styling controls.

Requirements

• Plone 6.0 or later
• plone.blicca.auroraeditor 1.0.0a4 or later

The JavaScript bundle is committed to the package. No Node is needed at install time.

Installation

Add the package to your project's dependencies:

# pyproject.toml
dependencies = [
    "derico.blicca.promoblock",
]

Then install Derico Blicca Promoblock from Plone's Add-ons control panel, or apply the derico.blicca.promoblock:default profile. Uninstalling removes the block registration again.

Using the block

Insert the Promo block in the Aurora editor and fill in the sidebar. The canvas is a live preview; all editing happens in the sidebar.

Default fieldset

Field	What it does
Kicker	Short line above the title
Title	The headline, rendered as an h2
Description	Plain text below the title
Image	Pick or upload a picture. The editor's image widget is used, so it looks the same as in every other block
Image placement	Left, right or center. Shown only once an image is set. Center puts the picture above the text

Actions fieldset

Field	What it does
Primary action label, link, style	The first call to action. Style is Button or Link
Secondary action label, link, style	The second one, same shape
Card link	Makes the whole card clickable. Shown only while both action labels are empty

Styling fieldset: block width, and a background colour if the site offers a palette.

Rules worth knowing:

• An action renders only with both a label and a link. A label without a link, or a link without a label, renders nothing and the canvas says so.
• As soon as either action has a label, the card link is ignored. Its value stays stored and comes back when the labels are cleared. There is never a link nested inside another link.
• The link fields accept a picked content item or typed text. Typed links must be a path or use http, https, mailto or tel. Anything else is dropped.
• An image whose target has been deleted stops rendering on the next load. The card reflows to the no-image layout and the canvas shows a notice.
• The image is decorative and rendered with an empty alt. The title and description carry the meaning.

Rendered markup

Every element appears only when it has content, and no container is emitted empty, so an empty promo is one <div>.

<a class="promo-cardlink" href="…">                <!-- only with an active card link -->
  <div class="promo has--align--left">
    <picture class="promo-image">                  <!-- only with an image -->
      <source type="image/avif" srcset="…" sizes="…">   <!-- public page, when AVIF is available -->
      <img src="…" srcset="…" sizes="…" width="…" height="…"
           alt="" loading="lazy" decoding="async">
    </picture>
    <div class="promo-copy">
      <p class="promo-kicker">…</p>
      <h2 class="promo-title">…</h2>
      <p class="promo-description">…</p>
      <div class="promo-actions">                  <!-- only with a rendering action -->
        <a class="promo-cta promo-cta-button" href="…">…</a>
        <a class="promo-cta promo-cta-link" href="…">…</a>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</a>

• The root div.promo always carries has--align--<value> with the placement that is actually in effect: center whenever there is no image, whatever was stored.
• The public page carries the responsive attributes on the <img> and, when the host supplies AVIF, one AVIF <source> in front of it. The React renderer emits the same elements and classes with a plain <img>.
• The action style is spelled as a class, promo-cta-button or promo-cta-link. There is no class for primary or secondary; DOM order tells them apart.
• Block width and background classes are added by the host on a wrapper around this markup, as for every Aurora block.

How it works

The block stores its text fields, the image reference, the link strings, the placement and the action styles. The image is the only field the server touches:

1. On every load, a plone.restapi block serialization transformer resolves the stored image reference and injects image_url, image_scales and image_field into the block data, plus image_ref, the reference those three were derived from. A reference whose target is gone gets image_ref but no image_url, which is how both renderers know to draw the no-image layout.
2. On save, a matching deserialization transformer strips all four keys again, so derived image data is never written to the database.
3. The public renderer picks the smallest of the site's picture variants (small, medium, large or fullwidth) that covers the width the image can get, derived from the block width and the placement, and puts its srcset on the <img> with a matching sizes. When supplied by plone.namedfile, the AVIF twin of that ladder goes into a <source> in front. An SVG or an external image URL gets a plain <img>.
4. The React renderer reads image_url. A freshly picked image that has not been serialized yet is previewed from the reference itself, and image_ref lets the canvas tell a stale derived set from a fresh one.

The transformers are registered for content with the IBlocks behavior and for the site root, so a promo in a footer stored on the site root works on every page. Nested blocks inside a text container are transformed too.

Two renderers emit the same markup: a Chameleon template registered as the @@aurora-block-promo view for the public page, and a React view component for the editor canvas and for Aurora frontends. The rules that decide what renders (defaults, the click rule, the link screen, the effective placement) are spelled once per language, in promo_data.py and in bundle-src/src/promo/data.ts, and the Python test suite reads the TypeScript file to keep the two in step. Both renderers read the shared fixture tests/anatomy-cases.json in their test suites, so they cannot drift apart unnoticed.

The two-column layouts collapse to the stacked layout through a container query on the block's own width, not a media query. The editor canvas and the published page are different widths at the same viewport, and a viewport query would get the canvas wrong.

Theming

Nineteen CSS custom properties are the whole styling interface. Set them on :root or on your theme's own scope root; they inherit into the block. Do not set them on .promo itself and do not override the block's rules directly: the stylesheet is @scope-wrapped, and a scoped declaration wins over an unscoped one of equal specificity, so a plain rule in the theme would lose.

The block declares none of these properties. Every default is spelled at its point of use as var(--promo-x, <default>), so a value set on :root inherits in and wins without specificity games. The defaults are plain literals rather than --plone-* or --aurora-* tokens, because those vocabularies differ between themes and are absent in an Aurora frontend. A theme that wants its own scale sets the property to its own token, for example --promo-title-size: var(--plone-text-2xl).

property	default	what it controls
--promo-gap	2rem	gap between the image column and the copy column
--promo-flow	0.75rem	rhythm inside the copy stack, including between the two actions
--promo-padding	0	inner padding of the block root
--promo-measure	60ch	max width of the copy
--promo-border	none	border on the block root
--promo-radius	0	corner radius of the block root
--promo-image-width	1fr	the image's grid track at left / right
--promo-image-ratio	auto	aspect-ratio of the image box
--promo-image-radius	0	corner radius of the image
--promo-kicker-size	0.875rem	kicker font size
--promo-kicker-color	currentColor	kicker colour
--promo-title-size	1.75rem	title font size
--promo-description-size	1rem	description font size
--promo-link-color	currentColor	the link action style, and the card link
--promo-cta-bg	CanvasText	button background
--promo-cta-fg	Canvas	button text colour
--promo-cta-hover-bg	color-mix(in oklab, var(--promo-cta-bg, CanvasText) 88%, var(--promo-cta-fg, Canvas))	button background on hover
--promo-cta-radius	0.375rem	button corner radius
--promo-cta-border	none	button border

Example, a rounded card with a brand-coloured button:

:root {
  --promo-padding: 2rem;
  --promo-border: 1px solid var(--my-border-color);
  --promo-radius: 1rem;
  --promo-image-radius: 0.5rem;
  --promo-image-ratio: 4 / 3;
  --promo-cta-bg: var(--my-brand-color);
  --promo-cta-fg: white;
}

Notes:

• The padding defaults to 0 because the host's background band already pads the block. Turn padding on together with a border or a background of your own.
• The copy width is always capped, so a centred promo at full block width does not run its text across the whole bleed.
• The image ratio defaults to auto. Setting a ratio crops the image with object-fit: cover.
• The image width is a grid track, so 1fr, 22rem and 40% all work.
• The hover background is derived from whatever fill and text colour the theme set, so a theme that sets only the fill still gets a hover state.
• A button border exists so a theme can express a ghost button.
• There is no background or foreground property. The block's ground is the host's background band, chosen with the block's own background control.
• The block sets no focus outline and no font weight, line height or text transform. The host's focus style and the theme's heading styles apply unchanged. One visible consequence: the title has the theme's h2 weight on the public page and the editor's body weight in the canvas.

On the dark background band, Blicca forces every descendant's text colour to the band's foreground. That flattens the kicker colour, the link colour and the button text colour on that band. The button background still applies, so set --promo-cta-bg to a colour that works with the band's text colour.

Adding a property is a minor release. Removing or renaming a property, or changing a default, is a breaking change. See ADR 0002 for the reasoning.

Using the block in Aurora

The editor half lives in bundle-src/ as the npm package @derico/aurora-promo-block (not yet published). It registers the block and its three widgets through the usual install(config) entry point and resolves every other field to an upstream Aurora widget.

• The Python package must still be installed on the backend. The React view reads the derived image keys the server injects. Without it the image does not render.
• The description is a single line. It asks for the textarea widget, which the Blicca editor registers and Aurora does not.
• The image field has no label and shows no current selection. This is the host image widget's own shape in both hosts. The canvas is where the chosen picture is visible.
• Bring your own styling. The stylesheet is scoped to the Blicca roots and does not apply in an Aurora frontend.
• The block has been verified against the registry the Aurora installers build, not inside a running Aurora application.

Development

The JavaScript build output is committed into src/derico/blicca/promoblock/static/. Rebuild and commit it whenever bundle-src/src/ changes; CI fails when the committed bundle does not match the source.

cd bundle-src
pnpm install
pnpm build        # writes ../src/derico/blicca/promoblock/static/promo-block.{js,css}
pnpm test         # reads the built bundle, so build first
pnpm typecheck

uv run --extra test pytest

test/seam-lockstep.test.ts checks that the property table in this README matches the stylesheet literally, so keep the two in step. Design decisions are recorded in docs/adr/.

Every change to a GenericSetup profile XML file needs an upgrade step, even in an alpha release. Scaffold it with plonecli add upgrade_step.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later

Author

Maik Derstappen, derico, md@derico.de