3.3. Folder View

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For most content items, if you want to change how it looks, you edit the content directly.  But folders are a different animal. As containers of other items, folders can display their contents in a variety of ways. We'll cover each of the options in this section.

Consider a scenario where a butterfly enthusiast, John Smith, has logged in to his web site to work on the part devoted to Skipper butterflies.  He navigates to the "Skippers" folder by clicking the top tabs of the web site, or the navigation menu, which is on the left in his default Plone web site design. When he clicks the "Skippers" folder, the standard view tab panel, or just "standard view," for the folder is shown:

The View is always how a content item would show for anonymous web site visitors. Click the View tab when you want to see what a content item looks like after you have changed something.  For folders, you will see a listing of contained content items, in one of several list presentations, selected via the display pull-down menu. The default view is called standard view:

And, here is summary view:

 

And, tabular view:

And, thumbnail view, which is mainly useful for photographs, but still works for normal content:

 

Making a photo album is easy. Just add the photographs (images, or image files, the most common being .jpg files) to a folder and set the display view for the folder to thumbnail view.  Thumbnail view will automatically update the display as images are added to the folder, presenting a multi-page division into sets of images, as needed, as the number of images grows.

If you are uploading photographic images from a digital camera or scanner, you will most likely want to resize them on your local computer before uploading them, because they are too large.

Setting an Individual Content Item as the View for a Folder

The basic list view functionality described above for folders fits the normal way we think of folders -- as containers of items -- but Plone adds a nice facility to set the view of a folder to be that of any single item contained within the folder. This takes advantage of the way the navigation system gets automatically wired up in a Plone web site as folders are created (As folders are created and published, they automatically show up in the navigation menu). Consider several scenarios where the custom display setting feature for a folder is very useful:

• Let's say you are setting up a hierarchy of web pages, with customized text on the pages and links to other pages. This is a case where you as the web page designer would like to control what the pages look like, how the links to other pages appear, perhaps as links in a table or as icons in a graphic design.  For a custom web page that will contain links to "sub web pages," you would add the page to a folder and then set the default display view for the folder to be the contained page. The display menu is one of the basic menus available for a folder (Look at any of the screen capture images above). The basic folder views described above will be overridden, and when the folder is clicked in the navigation menu, the web page with the customized links to "sub web pages" will show. This may seem a bit daunting, but people who have created fairly complicated web page hierarchies and menu systems appreciate this functionality, because of the intimate way folders form the navigation system of Plone web sites. A custom web page for a folder can be an elaborate graphical design, or it can be a simple textual description with instructions to use the navigation menu, as the following video illustrates:
  

  Watch a Plone 2 video about setting the page display view.

• For another situation where this functionality is useful, consider a folder as a container of a document that gets updated periodically. There could be twenty versions of the document in the folder, but only one is current.  The display of the folder would have been set to show the view of the first version of the document, when it was first created.  As new documents were uploaded, the display of the folder was reset each time to show the current document, and the defunct documents were kept around for posterity, but set as private, so they won't appear.
• This dual nature of Plone folders, acting as generic containers or as navigation-wired "nodes" in a hierarchy, allows a kind of put-stuff-where-you-need-it approach. As the site is developed, folders get naturally created as work progresses.  Pre-existing files, images, web pages get uploaded or newly created in folders throughout the web site.  By "naturally" here, we mean that storage of content just falls out in the normal course of doing the work, just as you would add and organize files on your personal computer without thinking about it too hard.  Before you know it, you have a large system of folders in a hierarchy, with some folders containing all sorts of files.  Plone web sites get like that too, but this is a good thing -- it is a content management system, after all.  An individual folder might contain all sorts of old pages, supporting data files and documents, original graphics files, etc., but if the display view for the folder is set to a single page amongst the crowd, the other documents will not be seen when the web site is surfed. But they will be there next year when you ask, "Now where did I put the original Adobe Illustrator version of that graphic?," and answer "Oh, yes, it is in the folder along with all the other stuff on that project." This way of doing things -- taking advantage of the storage system aspect of Plone -- is very important when several people share web site folder access and work collaboratively, but it happens even for web sites managed by a single person.
  

These examples illustrate that the flexibility of Plone folders is a central feature in the content management system. 

Next, we move to the Contents tab to see important functions for managing content.