[Product-Developers] Best way to generate custom frontpage
Dave Turvene
dave at dahetral.com
Tue Jan 27 17:14:36 UTC 2009
For years, I have been using a fairly complex ZPT to generate a custom frontpage
hitting the catalog and formatting recent news, recent blog entries, a prose
area from an ATDocument Cookedbody(), etc. Over time, the ZPT has become too
complex. Spurred on by the way-cool Professional Plone Development book, I
started working on moving my sites to Plone3-ish concepts.
I tried creating a BrowserView
subclass and stick all the gnarly stuff into it and defining it as a
browser:page in configure.zcml. That works great when I do ``site/myfrontpage``
or ``site/@@myfrontpage``, and is MUCH easier than my old nested
tal:define/tal:repeat/tal:define oddness. But when I try to set the
``default_page`` property to it, I get what looks like a reference to the class
instance itself, not a rendering. After hacking around some, I ended up using a
mypolicy/profiles/default/types/Plone_Site.xml file with an additional
view_method value for my browser view.
My questions:
* Why do I need to add the BrowserView class to Plone_Site.xml to make this
work? Should I define my BrowserView as a browser:view for this? It seems like
folder.xml has view_methods also. Is it possible to develop a MyFrontPage.xml
file with the desired FTI information in it (that would be cool, then it would
be isolated?)
* More importantly, is this the best way to implement this? It seems like I
can do something like this with a viewlet.
* Finally, what is the best scope for MyFrontPage? Currently I have use
``for="*"`` but is it preferable to use something like
Products.CMFCore.interfaces.ISiteRoot? BTW, if that sounds like a dumb
question, I understand I need to look more at what this clause does.
I apologize for the long question(s) but this, I believe, can be a valuable
recipe if done correctly.
Dave
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