[Zope3-dev] Re: AW: Pagelets and UI (was: IsarSprint topics - Zope 3application components)

[Joe Geldart]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:02:30 +0200, dev wrote:
> 
> This portlets can be placed in a instance (annotation) 
> like a marker (object). This marker (object) has additional
> information for the view (page template).
>

I won't interleve my explanation with your comments (its a little awkward :)

Pagelets are subscribers on an object interface, a view interface and a
region interface. Valid pagelets (meeting conditions and permissions) from
a region are obtained and injected into some boilerplate structural
markup. The pagelets are already ordered by their weight. This system
allows pagelets to include regions, and for structural decisions (such as
which regions are in columns) to be made in the templates.

In our terminology (which we developed in Plone) a portlet is a small
chunk of secondary content (not necessarily in one of the two columns that
typically grace sites) and a pagelet is a small chunk of a page. This does
seem to indicate that portlets are a subtype of pagelets but for various
usage reasons its generally beneficial to regard them as separate and
simply include portlets using a pagelet.

Currently pagelets are separate to widgets (for implementation reasons)
but it is in our plan to gradually merge them into a single unified
system. This would mean that all components of a page can be modularised
using the same paradigm. This is of course desirable, but depends on
turning views into multi-adapters (as per Jim's proposal). So its in the
roadmap, but isn't essential to us now. We would appreciate some help
achieving this however.

To render two different instances of a folder differently, you just apply
condition attributes to the pagelet directives. A condition is any TALES
expression, so you can do quite complex things (such as conditioning a
pagelet's appearance depending on the traversal path or some object
property)

Netalley Networks LLP are hoping to send Michael Zeltner to attend
IsarSprint. He'd be happy to collaborate with you in increasing the power
of the pagelet concept and moving your portlet system to be rendered as a
(set of) pagelet(s).

We're also very keen on merging the concepts of pagelets and form/view
generation from a schema. If you could help with that, it would be very
much appreciated. I am currently (and usually) on #zope3-dev and #z3-base
on Freenode if you wish to chat. My nickname is Arnia.

Regards,
-- 
Joe Geldart, Senior Partner
Netalley Networks LLP
http://www.netalleynetworks.com