[Zope3-dev] [DRAFT] local portlets and perspectives

[Jim Fulton]

Jean-Marc Orliaguet wrote:
...

> What problem perspectives solves?
> ------------------------------------------------------

I think I'm ready to respond to this now. I hope, with your current
thinking that this is still relevent.

> local portlets are currently stored in local folders in a .cps_portlets
> container with the name of the slot in which they are located.

So, .cps_portlets is a container with an item for each slot, which, is,
itself a container?  Then users add items to this container to add portlets?

> It means that the user has to go into a given folder, add a portlet into
> a slot and the portlet will be visible starting from this folder. After
> a while there are 100 of portlets scattered around the entire site, some
> in /sections/A, some in /sections/A/B some in / ...
> 
> there is no grouping of portlets.
> 
> we find out that what users actually want to do is to define a set of
> portlets that will be shown in a given section of the site (eg. in
> 'education', in 'research', ...) and only there.

Meaning not in subfolders?

 > This is somehow done
> when portlets are stored in folders, but it is very difficult to group
> the portlets together, because there is no notion of "group of portlets"
> displayed in given context.

I don't know what you mean by "grouping portlets", or why it is a good thing.

> so basically the notion of perspective is just a way of grouping
> portlets together and give a name to that collection, so that a user can
> decide: when I'm in this section of the site, I want to show this set of
> portlets.

This doesn't seem consistent with your current notion of perspectives.

> In an application, this makes it possible to keep the portlets used by
> the application (action portlets, navigation portlets) separate from
> decoration portlets.

I'n not sure what you mean.  By "application", do you mean the content
management application, as opposed to the end-user content-delivery
application?

> currently we manage the separation by using different themes (one for
> the external site, and one for the "back office"), the slots names are
> different, so the portlets in the backoffice on not visible on the
> external site.

And how is this solution undersireable?

> Also we have problem when a same slot is present in many pages, the
> users think that they are add portlets only on a given page, while they
> end up also being visible in other pages.

I'm not sure what you mean by page here.  Do you mean theme/master pages
or web pages?

Jim

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