Products.Doormat 1.2

Introduction

A doormat is a couple of links which are presented in a structured way. One example is the current plone.org, where the div#sitemap at the bottom consists of some ordered bundles of internal and external links, with sections called “Downloads”, “Documentation”, “Developers”, “Plone foundation” and “Support”. See more examples of doormats.

This product adds a couple of content types (Archetypes), which are used to create a structure which is used for generating a doormat. A viewlet on this doormat is placed in the Plone footer. The links in the Doormat are managed as content, making the Doormat more flexible than a sitemap. It’s also possible to add external links. It’s also possible to add bits of text, with markup.

Quick feature overview

• Internal links

• External links

• Text blocks (including images)

• Links from Plone Collections

• Can have any number of columns

• Can have multiple sections per column

Similar products

collective.doormat

collective.doormat also lets you creates a doormat in your site, but takes a different approach: Instead of creating a structure of content objects, it offers a configuration panel where you can create the doormat in a single rich text field.

This approach is a lot easier for maintaining the doormat.

It doesn’t take permissions into account, so links might point to internal content to which the visitor viewing the page has no access. There is also no way to add content from collections.

Getting started

After installing the product in your site, you should have a “Doormat” item in your Plone site, which should show up in the folder contents of the site. Inside it, you can create a hierarchical structure of Columns, Sections, links (both internal and external), Documents (Plone’s Page type), and Links to a Collection (DoormatCollection). There should be one Column, one Section and one Document already there.

The Doormat may look like this, schematically:

+-- Doormat ----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                                       |
|  +-- Column 1 ----------+  +-- Column 2----------+  +-- Column 3 ------------------+  |
|  |                      |  |                     |  |                              |  |
|  |  +-- Section 1 ----+ |  | +-- Section 1 ----+ |  | +-- Section 1 -------------+ |  |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | |  | |                          | |  |
|  |  |  +-- Link 1 --+ | |  | |  +-- Link 1 --+ | |  | |  +-- Document 1 -------+ | |  |
|  |  |  +------------+ | |  | |  +------------+ | |  | |  |                     | | |  |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | |  | |  | (Contact info)      | | |  |
|  |  |  +-- Link 2 --+ | |  | |  +-- Link 2 --+ | |  | |  |                     | | |  |
|  |  |  +------------+ | |  | |  +------------+ | |  | |  +---------------------+ | |  |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | |  | |                          | |  |
|  |  |  +- Document -+ | |  | |                 | |  | |  +- DoormatCollection -+ | |  |
|  |  |  |            | | |  | |                 | |  | |  |                     | | |  |
|  |  |  |            | | |  | |                 | |  | |  | Item 1 from Collctn | | |  |
|  |  |  +------------+ | |  | |                 | |  | |  | Item 2 from Collctn | | |  |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | |  | |  | (...)               | | |  |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | |  | |  | Link to Collection  | | |  |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | |  | |  |                     | | |  |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | |  | |  +---------------------| | |  |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | |  | |                          | |  |
|  |  +-----------------+ |  | +-----------------+ |  | +--------------------------+ |  |
|  |                      |  |                     |  |                              |  |
|  +----------------------+  +---------------------+  +------------------------------+  |
|                                                                                       |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

In fact, you can add more than one section, they will be displayed below each other. In each section, you can mix internal links, external links and Documents.

And in real life:

Note that the product adds an extra hierarchical layer compared to the plone.org doormat: it adds a Column, which can contain more than one Section. An example using this structure is the Oosterpoort, which actually is the product’s predecessor.

Adding a Document

Adding and editing a Document to the Doormat is just as simple as adding it in any other place. However, keep this in mind that only the “Body text” field will be displayed in the Doormat. Other fields, most notably the title and description will be omitted.

Links to Collections

It’s also possible to add a “Link to Collection” item (DoormatCollection). This allows yout to point to a Plone Collection object, and take the items from that.

Simple configuration

By default, the Doormat is excluded from navigation.

There’s a field showTitle on the folderish types (Doormat, Column and Section) which allows content managers to decide if the item’s title should be displayed in the doormat.

More advanced configuration and styling

This section is intended for integrators and/or developers who would like to customize the way the doormat is rendered in more detail.

<div class="row">
  <div class="cell width-full position-0" >
    <div id="doormat-container" />
  </div>
</div>

Caveats

Dependencies / Requirements

The product works on:

• Plone 3

• Plone 4

Credits

See Changelog.

This product was originally sponsored by GroningerForum.

Changelog

For developers

UML deprecation notice

This product’s content types were created with ArchGenXML (AGX), a tool to generate code from a UML model. AGX is no longer widely used, since Dexterity content types have replaced Archetypes as the default content type story.

Since version 0.9, this package has tests, for which plone.app.testing is used. Making AGX work with this doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble. Therefore the UML model and everything that’s related to it was removed.

You’ll still find the UML and its documentation in a pre-0.9 version of the code.

To do

• Add some sort of caching for getDoormatData and getDoormatTitle methods, or for the entire viewlet. Or at least get an idea of how expensive they are. Currently the viewlet computes the whole doormat each time it is rendered.