[Product-Developers] Re: improving Collage customization, round 2

[David Glick]

On Aug 13, 2008, at 2:31 PM, Malthe Borch wrote:

> 2008/8/13 David Glick <davidglick at onenw.org>:
>>
>> I'm writing seeking your opinion on some recent work I've done on  
>> making
>> Collage views easier to customize.  Malthe and Paul, you know that  
>> I tried
>> to do this once earlier, but didn't come up with a workable solution.
>> Gilles, this may be new to you, but it looks like you've been doing  
>> some
>> good work on maintaining Collage lately, so I wanted to make sure  
>> you're
>> part of this conversation.
>>
>>
> Yes, we definitely want to keep everybody in the loop; thanks for  
> this, David.

In the interests of this I'm adding plone-developers to the cc here.

>> My changes are in the davisagli-layer-overrides branch in svn
>> (https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/Collage/branches/davisagli-layer-overrides 
>> ).
>> Basically what I did is make sure that Collage *adds*  
>> ICollageBrowserLayer
>> to the request, instead of replacing any other marker interfaces.   
>> This
>> makes it possible to register Collage views on other browser  
>> layers.  But
>> how do we tell which views are meant for Collage then?  I added an
>> ICollageView interface which the custom view classes can  
>> implement.  I've
>> also written the view lookup so as to maintain backwards  
>> compatibility --
>> e.g. views registered to the ICollageBrowserLayer but not  
>> implementing
>> ICollageView will still be found.
>
> I think I've written earlier, that we should try and look at what
> Plone is contemplating on this matter; I seem to recall that there's a
> general notion of an ``ITile`` interface which describes a view or
> viewlet that renders a content item in a "tile".
>
> Perhaps it would make sense to register collage tiles like so:
>
>  <browser:viewlet
>       name="default"
>       for="ATDocument"
>       template="document_tile.pt"
>       permission="zope2.View"
>       manager="ICollage" />
>
> Of course, Collage would be a strange viewlet manager, but the concept
> is a bit familiar; we would manually look up these viewlets.

This looks like a fairly decent suggestion.  It takes care of the  
customization problem, and I like that it re-uses a concept (viewlets)  
that is already quite familiar to plone 3 themers.

The downside over my branch is that my branch adds some measure of  
customizability without breaking any backwards compatibility.  I  
should probably have clarified that the goal of my branch was not to  
come up with the final, long-term solution for this problem, but to  
make it possible for us to use Collage with themed sites for clients  
in the short term.  (We tend to run ~15 sites per zope instance, so  
registering things to a particular layer is essential.)

>> The only downside is that collage views registered on a layer other  
>> than
>> ICollageBrowserLayer may be traversed to directly, not just within  
>> the
>> Collage (because these layers are probably applied globally by  
>> plone.theme
>> or plone.browserlayer).  I don't think this is a huge problem  
>> though as long
>> as you take care to pick a view name which doesn't conflict with  
>> something
>> else.  Paul, this was an issue for you with my last attempt, but I  
>> think the
>> backwards compatibility discussed above will allow you to keep  
>> doing what
>> you're doing.
>
> I think this is problematic. These views should require a special
> request, not a browser layer request. Of course, if they're viewlets,
> as sketched out above, then this problem goes away entirely.

>
>> Thoughts?  I'd be happy to merge this to trunk.
>
> I think we should issue Collage 1.2 (I've tried a couple of times, but
> was let down by plone.org) and then move to these more drastic changes
> (e.g. 2.0).

I think my vote for 1) releasing Collage 1.2 as it stands, and 2)  
switching to viewlets on trunk, and pushing out an alpha or beta  
release of this fairly quickly.

>> Separate topic: Are there plans to turn Collage into an egg?  This  
>> should be
>> pretty simple, and I'm willing to take care of it if there are no
>> objections.  I would do it in the Products namespace as seems to be  
>> the
>> custom, so that it's still possible to release an old-style tarball.
>
> +10.

I'll do this as soon as you tag the 1.2 release.

>
>
> \malthe

peace,

David Glick
Project Associate
ONE/Northwest

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davidglick at onenw.org
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