[Product-Developers] Announcing `collective.panels`

[Malthe Borch]

On 29 March 2012 18:30, Jean-Michel FRANCOIS <toutpt at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you turn of the jquery integration of masonry you get a float series of
> portlets you can then style with css in an easy way (aka
> http://salon-natura.com home page). It's integration keep origin manage
> portlets button of Plone and add two portlets manager.

I've tried in `collective.panels` to take this idea – which is shared
to some extent by "content wells" – and generalize it.

It basically turns any viewlet manager into a "panel manager" – a kind
of portlet manager with "panel" assignments, each of which in turn
contain a number of portlets that are shown in the layout defined by
that panel.

It's possible – although I haven't explored this yet – to consider
these panels as assignments themselves, complete with their own
"data". This might be used to configure the layout – for instance, one
might select a particular color scheme, or background image.

The existing portlets machinery is used where possible, and we
actually get quite far with the default portlet components, i.e.
assignment and portlet storage, as well as the portlet management
macros.

I think that unlike "portlet page", the interface in
`collective.panels` is a lot less cluttered because it uses
collapsible fieldsets to hide the user interface away until needed.

\malthe