collective.ttw

Happy hacking for Plone

Origin

Hackability is not a bug, it is a feature.

See Turning hackability into a use case

Principle

The ZMI is ugly and old, we want something more fancy to hack Plone.

collective.ttw proposes to use massively the Plone theming editor to customize non themed-related elements.

Features

Regular Plone views

• Templates contained in the /overrides folder would be editable using the theming editor and would be plugged properly in z3c.jbot.

• A more user-friendly approach could be to enable content-to-content transformation in Diazo, so any part of a Plone page could be easily replaced by a custom view (see below).

Custom views

We can create views through the theming editor (in /custom for instance), they would behave as actual Browser Views, and they would be built that way:

• templates: just basic ZPT templates
• Python: Python files containing functions.

For instance, we create a file named myviews containing:

def menu():
    template = getTemplate('menu.pt')
    menus = ['Try it for free', 'Subscribe']
    return template(menus=menus)

def get_description(obj):
    return obj.Description()

Then we can get the menu resulting html by accessing ./@@ttw/myviews/menu, and it can be used for instance in our Diazo rules.xml like this:

<replace 
    css:theme="#menu"
    href="./@@ttw/myviews/menu" />

In content-to-content mode:

<replace 
    css:content="#portal-siteactions"
    href="./@@ttw/myviews/menu" />

It could also be inserted as a portlet.

Regarding the get_description function, it could be called from a template like this:

<div tal:content="python:context.unrestrictedTraverse('@@ttw/myviews').get_description(context.news)" />

File-system / TTW round trip

Everything is managed in our Diazo theme, TTW defined items can be exported and then stored in an actual Plone module in the /static folder.

Implementation

Security

Python code will be compiled and run securely using zope.untrustedpython.interpreter, and will receive as parameter the current context and request.