collective.blog.view 1.2

Using collective.blog.view

All you need to use it is to add it to the dependencies of your Plone setup in one way or another, and include the zcml.

After this the blog view can be seen by simply adding /blog_view to the end of a folder or collection.

Although collective.blog.view doesn’t need any installation, there is a profile included. If you install this view you get Blog View as a view option for all folders anc collections, easily turning any folder into a Blog with a simple click of the button. It will also create the blog_view_items and blog_types property, see below.

Installing this profile will override any changes you have done to the view methods of Folder, Large Plone Folder and Collections. It’s generally not recommended to install the profile on a heavily customized site, it’s better to make the changes manually, they are few and simple.

Settings

collective.blog.view has only two settings. They are both in portal_properties.site_properties.

• blog_view_items: This integer property will be used as the number of items to show per page in the blog view. If it does not exist, it will default to ten items.

• blog_types: This lines property will be used to contain the portal_types that are considered entries in the blog. If it does not exist, it will default to Document, News Item and File. It’s ignored when you use the blog view on a collection, all items in the collection will then be considered blog items.

Prettyfication

collective.blog.view is functional out of the box. But it is not pretty. Attempts of making it pretty with a standard Plone site is likely to be wasted, as most Plone sites tend to have their own content types and their own skins. So I’m not going to add extra complexity and potential for confusion in this case, since it’s likely to not be used anyway.

To make the blog view look great on your site, you will most likely want to create custom entry views for your content types. Simply create a view (Zope 3- style) for your content type and call it blog_item_view. There you return the HTML you want, without HTML and BODY tags, just the HTML snipped you need.

The default views includes the “Send This / Print This” links, and if you are logged in also the History of th object. This is because the default view will use the default ATContentTypes views and their “main” macro. For Archetypes Content that are not standard ATContentType, the base_view will be used. If you are using standard content types, you might want to make custom views for these too. The procedure is the same.

Lastly, to make it prettier, adjust your css for the blog-listing, blog-item and comment-link DIVs, so it looks good on your site.

What this product do not have

There is no Plone Control Panel in this product, nor will there ever be one, so you need to change the settings through the ZMI. There will also never be any per-folder settings, as that would require extending the schema for folders or have a dedicated blog type, both which will defeat the main goal of this product: simplicity and flexibility.

A Plone Control Panel may make sense, but will in that case end up in a separate product, and installed separately.

This product will never use doctests to test anything besides documentation.

1.2 (2010-06-30)

• import Batch directly from PloneBatch since with Zope 2.13 Batch is not available at the package level when collective.blog.view is loaded. [vangheem]

• Reversed sorting in the view. [lregebro]

1.1 (2010-06-05)

• collective.blog.feeds needed a setting for portal_types, so for consistency collective.blog.view now uses the same setting with the same default. [regebro]

• It now shows the amount of comments each entry has, if it has comments enabled. [regebro]

• The view now accepts year and month parameters (in the url or form) and then restricts the entries to these dates. This means the view now also can work as an archive view. [regebro]

• Added credits to Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek. [regebro]

• Plone 4 support. [regebro]

• Make use of the typesUseViewActionInListings site property. [regebro]

This version has been tested with Plone 3.3.4 and Plone 4.0b3.

1.0 (2010-05-14)

• Initial release

This version has been tested with Plone 3.3.4.