Cut/Paste

Moving items from one area to another on a website is a common task.  Often this need arises with placement of content in the wrong folder.  For example, if the author of the following content about Skipper butterflies realizes that a Swallowtail butterfly was mistakenly included -- the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder shown below -- the folder can simply be moved with a cut/paste operation:

Note that the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder has been checked, and that the cut button is about to be clicked.  After clicking the cut button, the screen will show a new paste button. The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder and all of its contents are now in the web site's "memory."  The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder does not immediately disappear, however, awaiting the actual paste operation. The paste button is now highlighted to show the cut/paste operation is in progress:

The paste button is now active. The next step is to navigate to the destination folder, in this case the Swallowtails folder:

After clicking the Swallowtails folder, the paste button will continue to show, because the paste operation has not yet been completed:

 And last, clicking the paste button for the destination folder adds the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder to its proper place in the Swallowtails folder, and cuts it from the original location, the Skippers folder, and the cut/paste operation is complete:

The paste button remains active, because you would be allowed to continue pasting the folder in other places if you wanted.  This could happen in several situations, including when you need to copy one page, for example, as a kind of template or basis document, into several folders.

Copy/Paste

A copy/paste operation is identical to the cut/paste operation, except that there is no removal of content from the original folder. It works as you would expect it to work.

 Watch a Plone 2 video about performing these operations.

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Of course, when we edit an item of content, the item already exists. Click the Edit tab for an item and you will see the data entry panel for the item, along with the existing values of the item's data.

For an example of something really simple, where editing looks the same as adding, we can review how to edit a folder.

The Edit panel for a folder simply shows the title and description input areas. Often a description is not provided for a folder, so the only thing changed is the title.  If you do wish to give a description, which is a good idea for distinguishing folders in a list, the description can be text only -- there is no opportunity for setting styling of text, such as bold, italics, or other formatting.  This keeps the descriptions of Plone content items as simple as possible.

Here is the Edit panel for a folder, in this case, one called "Butterflies":

That's it. Change what you want and save, and the content item will be updated in Plone's storage system. You can repeatedly edit content items, just as you can repeatedly edit files on your local computer.  By now you have appreciated that Plone stores discrete content items as separate entities, akin to "files" on a local computer, but you really don't have to think about it that way. Plone is a content management system, where the content comes in the form of numerous discrete content items that may be individually edited. Edit away at your heart's content.

For an example of editing a content item that is a bit different than adding in the first place, we can examine editing an image. Editing an Image can be done by navigating to an individual image and clicking the Edit tab. Clicking the Edit tab for the image, you will see the following Edit Image panel:

Here, an image called "Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly" is being edited.  You can change the title and description, as usual, in which case you would usually keep the setting to "Keep existing image."  You can also change the image itself by checking the "Replace with new image" choice. Or, clicking the "Delete current image" choice will simply delete the image entirely. 

Notice also the Transform tab at the top, which pertains specifically to images, offering a choice of several image transforms:

So, editing an image is a bit different than adding one in the first place, but not by much.

Editing panels for other content items are also usually just like the panels for adding.

Inline Editing (optional)

Inline editing is disabled by default in the latest versions of Plone (3.3+). It can be enabled through the control panel by a Site Manager (Site Setup -> Site -> Enable Inline Editing checkbox).

The normal procedure to edit a content item is to click the Edit tab and use the discrete input fields for the item.  For text fields, such as Title, Description, Body Text, etc., there is a quicker way to edit called inline editing. Inline editing is used when viewing the content item (the View tab is active).

As the mouse passes over editable text parts of the item, a subtle box will outline the editable text. In the following screen capture, the mouse cursor is not over editable text, so you see the page title and body text as normal:

But when the mouse is moved over the body text, a box highlights the body text as editable:

Clicking within the body text after the inline editing box has appeared will bring up the visual editor:

Change or add text and save, and the normal view is back. This is considerably quicker -- fewer clicks and less intervening wait time -- than clicking the Edit tab and bringing up the entire edit panel for the page.

If the mouse is moved over the title, also editable, an inline editing box appears:

Clicking the title after the box appears will activate a very simple editing field with a Save/Cancel choice:

Change the title and save. The speed benefit of inline editing is really sensed for editing something as simple as a title.

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:

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 dynamically reflects the folder structure of a Plone web site as folders are created.

You can set the display view for a folder to show a single page, which can be useful for showing the most recent document within a list of documents stored in the folder. Or, you can set it to a collection, which on its own is already a powerful content filter. The display view setting should be used with care, because it changes the behavior of folders, from acting as simple containers to acting as direct links to content. Instead, you can often accomplish what you want by only using collections, which will be covered later in this manual.

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

Next, we move to the Contents tab to see important functions for accessing content in a list of folder content.

The Contents tab for folders is like "File Manager" or "My Computer" system utilities in Windows and Linux desktops and the "Finder" in Mac OS X, with similar functionality.

Clicking the Contents tab for a folder, such as the "Skippers" folder below, shows the Contents tab panel:

The Contents tab panel is immediately recognized by observing the check boxes beside the items in the contents list.  Click these check boxes to select multiple items for performing copy, cut, rename, delete, or change state operations.

Plone has a clipboard for copy and cut operations.  If you check one or more items, and click cut or copy, a paste button will be added to the row of buttons along the bottom of the panel. If you then click another folder, you'll be able to paste the items there.  For a cut operation, the items will remain in the source folder -- they won't disappear -- until they are pasted somewhere.

Renaming items will show a panel for entering a new name for the short name (or id) of the item, as well as the title.  The distinction between short name and title is one that becomes apparent only when you rename, because Plone automatically creates the short name from the title in most Plone web sites.  But the renaming operation must show you the short name as well as the title, because usually would want to change both, if changing either. Consider the following example:

If you were to change the title to "Long-tailed Skippers," you would also change the short name to "long-tailed-skippers." This keeps things tidy -- it keeps them correct, so that the URL for the item, the web address, is kept up-to-date with the actual content item. Note that the short name should contain no blanks. Use dashes for any blanks in the title, and otherwise make it a carbon copy of the title. Also, use lowercase for the short name. See also the page "What's in a Web Name?" for a description of how Plone handles web addressing and the short name. The following video also includes in illustration of renaming:

Watch a Plone 2 video that includes renaming an item.

The delete operation is straightforward. Click to select one or more items, and then the delete button, and the items will be deleted.

The change state operation offers a great way to change the publication state of a selection of folders, and their subfolders if you select this option. In the following example, the publication state for a folder called "Long-tailed Skippers" is being modified. Checking the "Include Folder Items" will make the state change affect all contained content.  Don't forget that you can do this to, say, three folders at a time, and all of their subfolders and contained content, so that in one fell swoop you can quickly publish, unpublish, etc.

Shift-clicking to select a range of items works. This could be very handy for a folder with more than a dozen items or so, and would be indispensable for folders with hundreds of items.

In addition to these individual action operations, reordering is a natural mouse-driven manipulation, as described in the next section. 

Consider the following folder, called "Skippers," for holding information about this type of butterfly.  Often, when we add content items, we don't initially get them in the order we want.  The desired ordering is not always alphabetical, but in this example we can assume so. Below you see the Skipper butterfly subfolders are not in alphabetical order:

To move the top item named "Spread-winged Skippers" to the bottom of the list, one would click within the Order column on the right (containing the "double-colon" symbols) and drag the row to the desired position:

Dragging and dropping is done by holding the mouse button down as you move the item. The item that is being moved turns yellow as it is being moved:

When the mouse button is released, the item stays where it was dropped:

The Settings tab is found by clicking the Edit tab for the folder. There is a toggle for enabling previous-next links for items contained in the folder:

Once enabled, as content items are added to the folder, previous and next links will automatically appear as needed:

Three pages have been created within the Cloudywings folder, and "Page Two" (which has no text, for this example) has been clicked. At the bottom of "Page Two" are links for "Previous: Page One" and "Next: Page Three."

This is a really useful feature!

Sometimes it is necessary to delete a content item, often to replace it with an updated version.  Or, you could simply delete an item, for a variety of reasons.  In the example of the swallowtail butterfly mistakenly added to the Skippers folder, instead of cutting it and pasting it somewhere, it could simply be deleted:

In the example shown above, the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder is about to be deleted.

Entire folders may be deleted, so care must be taken with the delete operation, but this is true for computer use in general, and we all have learned to do a last minute self-check to make sure the delete operation is intended.

When somebody clicks on the Edit tab, that item immediately becomes locked. This feature prevents two people from editing the same document at the same time, or accidentally saving edits over another users edits. In this example, George Schrubb has started editing the "Widget Installation" document. When Jane Smythe (who has permissions to edit that document as well) goes to view it, she will see the following:

Once George has finished editing the document and clicks the Save button, the document is automatically unlocked and available to be edited by others (should they have the proper permissions to do so, of course).

However, if it becomes clear to Jane that George isn't really editing the document anymore (e.g. the locking message says that the item was locked several days ago and not just a few minutes ago) then Jane can "unlock" it and make it available for editing again.

In Plone 3.3 or higher:

If a user leaves the edit page without clicking Save or Cancel, the content locking will remain effective for the next ten minutes after which time, the locked content item becomes automatically unlocked. This timeout feature is important for browsers that do not execute the "on-unload" javascript action properly such as Safari.

Should you desire to disable locking, go to the Plone control panel (Site Setup -> Site) and uncheck Enable locking for through-the-web edits.

Creating a new version

Plone 3.0 includes a versioning feature. By default, the following content types have versioning enabled:

• Pages
• News Items
• Events
• Links

Content items can be configured to have versioning enabled/disabled through the site setup / Plone Configuration panel under "Types".

When editing an item, you may use the "change note" field at the bottom; the change note will be stored in the item's version history. If the "change note" is left blank, it may be filled in automatically depending on the state of the item (e.g. if left blank the first time the item is saved, " " is used.)

A new version is created every time the item is saved.

Viewing the version history

Once an item as been saved, you can use the "History" tab to view the version history:

The most recent version is listed first and clicking on any of the column headers will re-sort the listing order.

Comparing versions

From the "History" tab you can compare any previous version with the current version by using the "Compare to current revision" link in the Actions column. You can also compare any version with the previous version by using the "Compare to the previous revision" link.

 
The legend indicates that added content is in lighter green and added tags are in darker green; similarly, the lighter red indicates the text that was deleted and darker red for the tags that were deleted; and finally text highlighted in yellow has been changed.

You can also view the differences in the code by clicking on the "Show code differences" link:

Previewing and reverting to previous versions

You can preview a previous version by clicking on the "preview" link in the Version column for any particular version from the "History" tab; on the subsequent page, you'll need to either click on the jump down link:

or scroll all the way down to see the actual preview:

To revert to a particular version, just use the "Revert to this revision" link. A comment will indicate when an item was reverted and what version it was reverted to:

Creating a new version

Plone 3 includes a versioning feature. By default, the following content types have versioning enabled:

• Pages
• News Items
• Events
• Links

Note that all other content types do track workflow history

Content items can be configured to have versioning enabled/disabled through the Site Setup -> Plone Configuration panel under "Types".

When editing an item, you may use the change note field at the bottom; the change note will be stored in the item's version history. If the change note is left blank, Plone includes a default note: "Initial Revision".

A new version is created every time the item is saved. Versioning keeps track of all kinds of edits: content, metadata, settings, etc.

Viewing the version history

Once an item as been saved, you can use the History viewlet found at the bottom of the page. Simply click History to expand the viewlet:

The most recent version is listed first. The History viewlet provides the following information:

• The type of edit (content or workflow)
• Which user made the edit
• What date and time the edit occurred
  
  

Comparing versions

From the History viewlet you can compare any previous version with the current version or any other version with the version just before it.

To compare any previous version with the one just before it, use the COMPARE button located between two adjacent versions in the History viewlet.

By clicking this button, you'll see a screen like this one where you can see the differences between the two versions:

In this example, text in red is text which has been deleted and text in green is text which has been added to the newer version. An empty paragraph tag is also shown to have been deleted in this example. You can toggle between inline or as code views of the differences between versions.

You may also compare any previous version to the current version by clicking the arrow icon in the History viewlet (left icon). These icons are found to the far right of each version listed in the viewlet.

Viewing and reverting to previous versions  

You can preview any previous version of a document by clicking the eyeball icon to the right of any version listed in the History viewlet (center icon).

To revert back to a previous version, click the clock-face icon to the right of any version listed in the History viewlet (right icon).

Presentation Mode is a special feature of the Page content type. You can enable Presentation Mode by editing the page, then going to the Settings tab. Notice the Presentation Mode checkbox available there. Once checked, a link will appear in the view of the page for a user to view the page in Presentation Mode.

How to Create Slides

All the content for a presentation lives on a single page. You do not need to create a page for each slide. A slide is created when you use the Heading (h1) class on the page - they effectively indicate to Plone where you want your slides to be.

You can have as many slides as you want in your presentation. Just add more Heading (h1) tags to your page and the content between that h1 tag and the next h1 tag becomes the content of your slide.

How to Format a Slide

It is very important to note that the Normal Paragraph style will not render any content in the slide. Slides are meant to display summary information, not chunks of paragraph text. As such, you must class all content in each slide with a style other than Normal Paragraph. Examples of those styles include:

• Heading (h1)
• Subheading (h3)
• Definition list
  
• Bulleted list
  
• Numbered list
  
• Literal
  
• Pull-quote
• Call out
  
• Highlight