collective.portaltabs

by Luca Fabbri last modified May 19, 2011 12:04 PM

Manage portal tabs from Plone, hiding difficulties

Project Description

Introduction

When you need this

You need this product when you want to give to your non-technical users the ability to manage the portal tabs section of your Plone site.

Going deeply:

  • you don't want that your users (even if Manager) go to ZMI
  • you users don't know nothing about TAL and python, and commonly want only to add static links to the site
  • your additional tab don't need advanced features like condition for being seen, or permissions

When you don't need this

If you only need to port into Plone the "portal_action" tool customization, you will find a great product in quintagroup.plonetabs

How to use

First note

This product only manage portal tabs that are not automatically generated from Plone. For this reason, a warning message is displayed if the "Automatically generate tabs" option is selected in the "Navigation settings" panel.

Handling tabs

From the "Site Setup" panel, go to the new "Manage portal tabs" link you'll find after the product installation.

View of the Site Setup panel

The "Portal Tabs settings" view is composed by two section; the first one for make changes to existing tabs (and also order and delete them), and the second for adding new tabs.

Manage portal tabs panel view

Newly created tab only need two kind of information: the name of the tab to be displayed (title) and the URL. When creating a tab you can also handle the id of the tab, or this will be automatically generated.

What I can write inside an URL section?

The product try to hide some of the too-technical feature you have available in the ZMI portal_actions tool management, however all features are still there.

  • to create a link to something, just type the link (e.g: "http://foo.org")
  • TAL espression are still available, but you need to start them with a "tal:"
  • inside an URL, you can still use expressions in the normal form "${foo1/foo2/...}"

Manage additional actions categories

You can use collective.portaltabs to handle also others than "portal_tabs". To do this you need to go to ZMI, in the "portal_properties" tool and change the "portaltabs_settings".

In the "manageable_categories" you can add additional entries:

portal_tabs|Portal tabs
foo_tabs|My special tabs

All entries are if the form "actions_id|Title to be displayed" and the action_id action category must be exists. Going back to the "Portal Tabs settings" make possible to handle also those new actions

Multiple CMF Category panel

Upload directly an "actions.xml" file

If you have defined your anc portal tabs using a Generic Setup profile, you can upload your actions.xml (or compatible file) file directly in the manage form.

Plone is an helephant, remember all

Please, remember that if you used an actions.xml in one of your product, Plone will remember all action you have loaded, and changes done manually later will be reverted if you reinstall it.

To make Plone stopping remember about those actions, you need to:

  • uninstall your product that added the actions
  • remote the products from the portal_quickinstaller ("Contents" tab)
  • remove the actions.xml file from your product
  • install again

TODO

  • Simplify creation of tabs that simply are links to site contents
  • Make possible for non-Manager users to handle tabs
  • Block users from creating TAL/Python expression if you don't want
  • Tests

Bug report and feature request

Please, go to the product's issue tracker on plone.org website.

Credits

Developed with the support of:

All of them supports the PloneGov initiative.

Authors

This product was developed by RedTurtle Technology team.

RedTurtle Technology Site

Self-Certification

[X] Internationalized

[ ] Unit tests

[X] End-user documentation

[ ] Internal documentation (documentation, interfaces, etc.)

[X] Existed and maintained for at least 6 months

[X] Installs and uninstalls cleanly

[ ] Code structure follows best practice

Current Release

No stable release available yet.

All Releases

Version Released Description Compatibility Licenses Status
0.2.0 New features More about this release…
Plone 4
Plone 3
GPL beta
0.1.0a First release More about this release…
Plone 4
Plone 3
GPL alpha

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