Products.Doormat 0.5

Introduction

A doormat is a large collection of links which are presented in a structured way. One example is the current plone.org, where the div#sitemap at the bottom is actually an ordered collection 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.

Getting started

After installing the product in your site, you can add a “Doormat” item to your Plone site. Inside it, you can create a hierarchical structure of Columns, Sections, links (both internal and external), and Documents (Plone’s Page type).

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 --+ | |  | |  |                | | |  |
|  |  |  +------------+ | |  | |  +------------+ | |  | |  +----------------+ | |  |
|  |  |                 | |  | |                 | |  | |                     | |  |
|  |  +-----------------+ |  | +-----------------+ |  | +---------------------+ |  |
|  |                      |  |                     |  |                         |  |
|  +----------------------+  +---------------------+  +-------------------------+  |
|                                                                                  |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

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.

Simple configuration

You’ll probably want to exclude the doormat object from navigation using the “Settings” tab. (This was not yet done when the above screenshot was taken.)

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

The viewlet does a catalog lookup for the Doormat portal type. If you have more than one object of this type (nothing stops you), it will use the oldest one.

Dependencies / Requirements

The product works on:

• Plone 3

• Plone 4

Credits

This product was sponsored by GroningerForum.

Changelog

For developers

This product’s content types were created with ArchGenXML. The model is in the the UML directory. There’s a makefile for generating: cd to Products/Doormat and run:

make -C ../../uml/

Please keep the UML model up-to-date so AGX code generation keeps working, unless you have good reason to do so, and please do not use older versions of AGX than the version it was last generated with. To do =====

• Remove instances of content types on uninstall.

• 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.