FlexPortlets

FlexPortlets provides two independent portlets for Plone. The Flex portlet simply displays a HTML message, ideal for short notices and information. The PayPal portlet provides a configurable donate button for donations to any PayPal account, and displays an additional message.

Project Description

Project Description

This product, FlexPortlets, contains two kinds of portlets:

• The Flex portlet retrieves its data from an HTML/CSS document (derived from the ATDocument archetype, a variant of a normal Plone page). In order to use such a portlet, first create a "Flex Portlet" document and name it "flex". It's best to put this document in a folder "myportlets", which should have public draft status, to keep it out from navigation. Afterwards go to the Zope Management Interface and select the Properties tab of the portal. You can add the portlet macro in the left_slots or right_slots list, for example "portal/myportlets/flex/portlet_flex". Note that only published content is shown (even after adding a portlet to the slots) and that the expiration settings are respected. The Flex portlet is based on the TI CSS portlet from ATTIPortlets 0.3.2 by Jakob Petsovits
• The PayPal portlet is similar to the Flex portlet and operates on "PayPal Portlet" documents. The differences to the Flex portlet is that you have to enter your PayPal PKCS7 signature/key, which you can generate from inside your PayPal member area, and such a document is not displayed in the navigation and is undiscussable by default. The purpose of this portlet is to display a "donate" button and a descriptive text. The button takes the visitor to PayPal's donation function. You can add this portlet using the macro "portlet_paypal" to left_slots/right_slots (for example "portal/myportlets/donate/portlet_paypal", see flex portlet above).

How to obtain the PayPal signature needed for the PayPal Portlet: Log into your PayPal account. Click on "Merchant Tools". On the right, click on "Donations". Here, make sure "Click Yes to encrypt your payment button" is set to yes (it should be, by default). Enter the details of your donation as you like them, then just click "Create Button Now". PayPal creates HTML code for a "Buy Now" button, and this code contains the PKCS7 signature you need to set up the portlet. Note that this signature corresponds to the donation details as you entered them, and will have to be regenerated every time you change them. Copy the signature into Plone, for example:
  -----BEGIN PKCS7-----UGIUboEihoihIHI...LotsOfChars...=-----END PKCS7-----

Requirements

FlexPortlets has been successfully tested using:
- Zope 2.9.5
- Plone 2.5.1

Installation

For installation follow these steps:

1. Copy the FlexPortlets folder into your Zope Products/ directory.Restart Zope
2. Verify in ZMI (e.g. http://localhost:8080/manage) that FlexPortlets appears in Control_Panel/Products
3. Use the Plone quick installer (Portal/portal_quickinstaller in ZMI) to add FlexPortlets to the Plone installed products
4. The rest is set up almost entirely in Plone (e.g. http://localhost:8080/Plone). Create a folder titled "MyPortlets" - Plone will give it the id "myportlets" - and exclude it from navigation by editing its properties. Here, you can click "add item" and add either a flex or a paypal portlet (let's title them "flex" or "donate" accordingly). So their accessing URL would be e.g. "/Plone/myportlets/flex" or "Plone/myportlets/donate". In order to use these documents as portlets, they must be published, so change their state to "submit".
5. Now it's time to turn on the portlets. This is done again in ZMI. To display the portlets use the macros "portlet_flex" or "portlet_paypal" on a document of the respective content. Edit the left_slots or right_slots properties of your Plone portal and append either "/here/myportlets/flex/portlet_flex" or "/here/myportlets/donate/portlet_paypal". Save the changes and go to your Plone portal's home page, and providing you published the "flex" or "donate" documents, behold your new shiny portlets!

Current Release

No stable release available yet.