Adding Portlet Managers

by Anne Bowtell — last modified Dec 06, 2009 06:58 PM
Contributors: Yuri Carrer
You need portlets at an additional place in your Plone. In this example we put contextual portlets above the content (contributed by Jens Klein)

This is about adding Portlet MANAGERS, hint: PortletManager != Portlet. A PortletManager is a kind of container for the portlets, like the ViewletManager is for Viewlets. So, after reducing the momentum of misunderstanding, lets start:

Prerequsites

I assume you're familar with GenericSetup based setups for Plone 3. Take a look at DIYPloneStyle and related tutorials if not.

You need Plone 3 installed and a Product NEWTHEME for your own skin (based on DIYPloneStyle works fine).

Strategy

In my example I don't want to customize the main-template. So the idea is to add a viewlet to the plone.app.layout.viewlets.interfaces.IContentViews viewletmanager. So the steps need to be done is

  1. Add a viewlet to the viewlet-manager
  2. Add a portlet-manager
  3. Add a management view for the portlet-manager.

Step One: Add a viewlet

in Products.NEWTHEME add a file abovecontentportlets.pt containing: 
<tal:block replace="structure provider:my.abovecontentportlets" />

Here we call the portlet manager, we create it in step two.
But first lets register our new viewlet for the viewletmanager.
Edit your Products/NEWTHEME/configure.zcml and add:

<browser:viewlet
    name="my.abovecontentportlets"
    manager="plone.app.layout.viewlets.interfaces.IContentViews"
    template="abovecontentportlets.pt"
    permission="zope2.View" 
/>

Step Two: Add a portlet manager

Create a marking interface for the manager and add or edit Products/NEWTHEME/interfaces.py

from plone.portlets.interfaces import IPortletManager

class IMyAboveContent(IPortletManager):
    """we need our own portlet manager above the content area.
    """

Add (or edit) your Products/NEWTHEME/profiles/default/portlets.xml and register a portlet manager:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<portlets> 
 <portletmanager 
   name="my.abovecontentportlets"
   type="Products.NEWTHEME.interfaces.IMyAboveContent"
 />
</portlets>

Thats all you need if you don't want to manage the portlets through the web. Oh, you want to? So you need a third step:

Step Three: Add a management view for the portlet manager

The management view is rendered for the left and right slots directly on the main-template. But we use a viewlet and in here we have a different view. so we need to call explicitly our view and call the our manager within its context.

 

We need to register a new browser view for an own page template directly calling our manager. Again add some lines to your configure.zcml: 
<browser:page
    for="plone.portlets.interfaces.ILocalPortletAssignable"
    class="plone.app.portlets.browser.manage.ManageContextualPortlets"
    name="manage-myabove"
    template="templates/managemyabove.pt"
    permission="plone.app.portlets.ManagePortlets"
/>
And finally we need the template, so add an file managemyabove.pt and edit it:

 

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:metal="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/metal"
      xmlns:tal="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/tal"
      xmlns:i18n="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/i18n"
      metal:use-macro="context/main_template/macros/master"
      i18n:domain="plone">
<head>
    <div metal:fill-slot="javascript_head_slot" tal:omit-tag="">
        <link type="text/css" rel="kinetic-stylesheet"
            tal:attributes="href string:${context/absolute_url}/++resource++manage-portlets.kss"/>
    </div>
</head>
<body>
<div metal:fill-slot="main">
  <h1 class="documentFirstHeading">Manage My Portlets</h1>
  <span tal:replace="structure provider:my.abovecontentportlets" />
</div>
</body>
</html>
That's it. After restarting your zope you can call http://DOMAIN.TLD/plone/path/to/some/context/@@manage-myabove

and assign portlets over your content.