Introduction

The Plone 3 portlets system gives site managers a powerful system for assigning portlets to different sections, content types, and groups. However, there is a predefined order in which portlets coming from these sources are displayed. So there is no built-in way to, for instance, specify that one contextual portlet should appear above any inherited portlets and another one should appear below them.

This product addresses that limitation by adding to each portlet assignment a "weight" field on the portlet management pages, where an integer can be specified (it defaults to 50). The full list of portlets will be retrieved in their standard order; then a final sort based on the weight will be applied before the portlets are displayed. Portlets with a lower weight will be sorted to the top, while portlets with a higher weight will be sorted to the bottom.

So, for example, if I wanted to display one contextual portlet above all inherited portlets and one contextual portlet below all inherited portlets, I could set their weights to 40 and 60 respectively.

Note that adjustments to the portlet order are saved via a KSS action; you don't have to press a button and reload the page to save the new weights.

Import and export of portlet assignment weights via GenericSetup is also supported.

Installation

Add the collective.weightedportlets egg to your buildout. If using Plone 3.1 or 3.2, make sure you add its ZCML as well. The ZCML should be loaded automatically in Plone 3.3.

Start Zope and install "Weighted Portlet Ordering" via the Add/Remove Products panel in Site Setup.

Compatibility

This product requires Plone 3.1 or greater. Tested with Plone 3.2.

This product operates by overriding the following parts of the portlet machinery. You may run into problems if using other products or custom code that also overrides these components:

• the template macros used to render the portlet management UI
• the manage-portlets.kss resource
• the IPortletRetriever adapter
• the IPortletAssignmentExportImportHandler adapter

Self-certification

• [X] Internationalized
• [X] Unit tests
• [X] End-user documentation
• [X] Internal documentation (documentation, interfaces, etc.)
• [X] Existed and maintained for at least 6 months
• [X] Installs and uninstalls cleanly
• [X] Code structure follows best practice
• [X] No side effects on Plone sites where not installed

Credits

David Glick, ONE/Northwest [davisagli]

Thanks to Martin Aspeli for the Plone 3 portlet system.