visaplan.plone.ajaxnavigation 1.0.dev6

Add AJAX navigation to a Plone site.

This is probably not the most advanced or state-of-the-art way to add AJAX navigation; for Plone 5, I was told about plone.patternslib, based on patternslib.

For Volto sites, the whole jQuery-based handling might be obsolete because of the use of React.js.

At the time of this writing, those were no options for me since I was still on Plone 4.3. Thus, I needed a working solution. Depending on the quality, I’ll switch to some Plone-5-ish solution when doing the leap, or I’ll stick with my own.

The general idea is:

• Catch the onclick event for every a element on the page.

• For some links, a special check will tell to proceed with the standard behaviour, i.e. load the target the standard way; this includes:

  • Link targets outside of the current site (another hostname is given)

  • Management pages (e.g. starting with manage_)

  • Other pages which don’t load the navigation links etc. anyway, or wouldn’t work when loaded via AJAX

  • Anchor elements with certain attributes

  • Views for contexts which don’t have a suitable embedable view yet.

  For such link targets, this function will simply return true, and the page is loaded in the standard way.

• If that check function concludes, “let’s load the target via AJAX”, it will look for certain elements on the page and try to update them:

  • content

    and, optionally:

  • breadcrumbs

  • other page elements

  It will also set the page url and title accordingly (from the @url and @title keys of the JSON reply, respectively), allowing for the browser history.

• If the tried URLs fail to return a usable JSON answer, or if the target URL is inappropriate for other reasons (e.g. page-local, or leaving the current site), the target page is loaded the normal, non-AJAX way (i.e., loading the whole page).

[buildout]

...

eggs =
    visaplan.plone.ajaxnavigation