Content templates for Plone
Project description
Overview
PloneTemplates is a product that allows you to make templates like you know them from other applications such as Word of Excel (don’t confuse them with zope page templates, it’s totally unrelated!!).
Usage is very simple. Suppose you have to create a Page many times with every time the same basic content. Instead of manually copying and pasting another Page that acts as the template, this product does it all for you with an easy to use user-interface.
First you create a Template object somewhere in your portal. Just like any other object using the Add new menu. This Template object is in fact a folder that can contain any other portal object (one or more!). In our example, we create a Page inside this Template. We edit this Page and we write its boiler plate body text (and whatever else you wish to preset) and you save the Page. Then you can write optional usage instructions in the Template object (edit tab) itself. This is all you need to do to define the template. Of course you can also copy/paste any existing objects inside the Template.
Now, the final step is to go to a place in the portal (usually a Folder) where we wish to enable this new Template so users can instantiate it. So, we edit the Folder and we click on the templates link (schemata/fieldset) at the top of the edit form. There we can use the Browse button to locate the newly created Template in the portal. (Here we can also choose if this Template is added to Templates already registered in higher levels in the Folder hierarchy).
So, we select the Template we just created and we press Save. From then on, a new drop-down menu called ‘template’s appears next to the Add new menu in the context of this Folder and in any of it’s subfolders. This menu contains the Templates the user can pick from.
So.. let this get to you for a few seconds…
So, to summarize, you can create a Template object, put in there whatever you want, register this Template anywhere in a folderish object in the portal and from then on you can consider this Template (actually it’s content) as a new addable object (or collection of objects)? Yes. That’s all there is to it!
Possibilities are endless. You can predefine all kinds of Issues that you want to have available in an Issue Tracker, you can predefine entire folder structures and put them in a Template like a project folder you want for each new project. Create a Page that holds the structure for a customer description etc etc.
Additional notes, read carefully!
After a Template is instantiated by a user somewhere, the focus is set to the first object that will be created. Also, the icon shown in the templates drop-down menu is from the first contained object inside the Template object.
Due to the way the current version of Archetypes deals with references, you cannot have Templates registered to a Folder that is INSIDE another Template. PloneTemplates uses references to register a Template to a Folder and references are lost when you copy/paste something. I know.. it sux and we know this for ages.
You can control if the user will get to see an intermediate page with the usage information when he picks a template from the menu. This is a switch in the Template edit form.
Workflow states are reset to their defaults when a templates gets instantiated. (This happens for everything that get’s copied and pasted and this is not different).
This product comes with a tool that also allows you to instantiate templates from script (Use the source Luke!) and you can even add a post-process function that can do something with the instantiated objects. I used that to create member areas with lots of stuff in there like subfolders, personal blogs etc etc.
There is a mixin-class to make your product also template aware so you can register Templates and have the templates menu. Add this in your product class:
from Products.PloneTemplates.TemplateSchema import PloneTemplatesMixinSchema
and do this with your schema:
schema = schema + PloneTemplateMixinSchema
Additionally, this product monkeypatches ATFolder to make it template aware (add a few fields to the schema). In config.py you can see how this is done and you can add other types as well in a similar fashion. Or, you can empty the list typesToPatch to not path the Folder type. So, out of the box, this product will only allow Folders to have a templates drop-down menu. In other words, if you have, let’s say an Issue tracker product that also needs to use templates, you have to either patch it (inject some fields) or use the mixin schema.
Changelog
1.0.3 (2011-10-07)
Updated metadata, reorganized code in Subversion. [hannosch]
Plone 4.1 compatibility. [mj]
1.0.2 (2011-08-08)
Fixed invalid XHTML for Chameleon compatibility. [hannosch]
1.0.1 (2011-08-03)
Fix project name to start with Products. so the content types are found. [hannosch]
1.0 (2011-08-03)
Provide package argument to registerType call. [hannosch]
1.0.0b4 (2009/05/15)
fixed packaging issue
1.0.0b3 (2009/05/04)
eggified (ajung)
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