Plone Templates

Plone Templates is a product that allows end-users to create content templates in the portal in a similar way as in other applications like Word or Excel. Any existing portal content can be used as a template for new content. Note: do not confuse these templates with ZPT templates in Zope and, ok, the name sux but that's for historical reasons. Sorry for that ;-)

Project Description

Usage is actually very simple. Suppose you have to create a number of Pages all with a similar structure like a product description for all your products. What you would do without this product is create a Page with the general structure for such a product description and manually copy and paste the Page for each product you want to describe. This product does all this work for you in an easy-to-use manner.

Then how does this work?

Step one: create the Template
First you create a Template object somewhere in your portal. Just like any other object using the Add new menu. This Template object is in fact a container that can contain any other portal object (one or more!). In our example, we create a Page inside this Template. We edit this Page and we write its the structure for a product description in the body text (and whatever else we wish to preset like the title (e.g. untitled-product) and we save the Page. Optionally, we can write instructions for the user of this Template in the edit form. This is all you need to do to create the Template. Of course you can also copy/paste any existing objects into the Template.

Step two: register the Template to a Folder
Now, the final step is to go to a place in the portal (usually a Folder) where we wish to enable this new Template so our editors can us it. So, we edit the Folder and we click on the templates link (schemata/fieldset) at the top of the edit form. There we can use the Browse button to locate the newly created Template in the portal. So, we select the Template we just created and we press Save. From then on, a new drop-down menu called templates appears next to the add item menu in the context of this Folder and in any of it's sub folders. This menu contains will now contain the template for the product description.

To summarize, you can create a Template object, put in there whatever you want, register this Template anywhere in a folderish object in the portal and from then on you can consider this Template (actually it's content) as a new addable object (or collection of objects)? Yes! That's all there is to it!

Possibilities are endless. You can predefine all kinds of Issues that you want to have available in an Issue Tracker, you can predefine entire folder structures and put them in a Template like a project folder you want for each new project. Create a Page that holds the structure for a customer description etc etc.

Current Release

No stable release available yet.