collective.cover

Table of Contents

• Life, the Universe, and Everything
  • Demo
  • Use cases
  • Who is using it?
• Mostly Harmless
  • Known issues
• Don't Panic
  • Installation
• Development
  • Upgrading from 1.x to 2.x
• Not entirely unlike

Life, the Universe, and Everything

collective.cover is a package that allows the creation of elaborate covers for website homepages, especially for news portals, government sites and intranets that require more resources than a simple page or collection can offer. However, despite offering rich resources to build a cover, collective.cover also provides a very easy mechanism for managing its contents, built around a drag-and-drop interface.

collective.cover is based on Blocks and Tiles, like Mosaic, the new layout solution for Plone.

Note

Starting from version 2.0b1 this package is compatible with Plone 5.1; nevertheless, there are some known issues.

Demo

For impatient types, there is a demo installation of collective.cover on Heroku. It needs about 60 seconds to spin up and it will purge all changes after about an hour of non-usage.

Use cases

Suppose you are running The Planet, a news portal that has a bunch of editors focused on getting news on different topics, like Economy, Health or Sports.

If you are the main publisher of the site, you may want to delegate the construction of the front page of the Economy section to the people working on that content area, but you might not want them messing around the Sports section as well.

Also, suppose you have the final game of the World Cup and the match is going to be defined on penalties: you may want to prepare a couple of cover pages and publish the right one focused on the team that won in the end.

These are the kind of issues we want to solve with this package; we are still far from it, but that is the idea.

Who is using it?

These are some of the sites using collective.cover:

• CartaCapital (BR)
• Clean Clothes Campaign (NL)
• Conselho Federal de Administração (BR)
• La Jornada (MX)
• Palácio do Planalto (BR)
• Portal Brasil (BR)
• Rede Brasil Atual (BR)
• Venezolana de Televisión (VE)
• European Climate Adaptation Platform (EU)

The Presidency of Brazil uses collective.cover on the front page of its site.

Mostly Harmless

Got an idea? Found a bug? Let us know by opening a support ticket.

Known issues

• URI validation happens outside modal window. This is an issue present on Banner and Basic tiles.
• Package is not compatible with standard Plone tiles. This will be addressed in a future release, if we get an sponsor.

See the complete list of bugs on GitHub.

Don't Panic

We are currently working on the documentation of the package; this is what we have right now (contributions are always welcomed):

• Quick Tour video on YouTube.
• End user documentation
• Developer documentation

Installation

To enable this package in a buildout-based installation:

Edit your buildout.cfg and add the following to it:

[buildout]
...
eggs =
    collective.cover

[versions]
...
collective.js.bootstrap = 2.3.1.1
plone.app.blocks = 4.2.0
plone.app.tiles = 3.1.0
plone.tiles = 2.1

If you want to use the relation field you must use the [relations] extra in your buildout configuration.

[buildout]
...
eggs =
    collective.cover [relations]

If you want to use a newer release of collective.js.bootstrap, you will need to update plone.app.jquery:

[versions]
plone.app.jquery = 1.8.3

After updating the configuration you need to run ''bin/buildout'', which will take care of updating your system.

Go to the 'Site Setup' page in a Plone site and click on the 'Add-ons' link.

Check the box next to collective.cover and click the 'Activate' button.

Note

You may have to empty your browser cache and save your resource registries in order to see the effects of the product installation.

Development

We use webpack to process static resources on this package. webpack processes SCSS and JS files, minifies the resulting CSS and JS, and optimizes all images.

To contribute, you should start the instance in one shell and start webpack watcher on another with the following command:

$ bin/watch-cover

Then go to webpack/app folder and edit SCSS and JS files; webpack watcher will automatically create the final resources in the right place.

There are also other commands added to handle more complex scenarios.

The following command will set the buildout node installation in the system PATH, this way you can use webpack as described on their documentation.

$ bin/env-cover

The following command generates JS and CSS without the minify step (it can be used to check the code being generated in a human readable way).

$ bin/debug-cover

The following command rebuilds static files and exit (insted of keep watching the changes):

$ bin/build-cover

Upgrading from 1.x to 2.x

In version 2.0b1 we removed a hard dependency on plone.app.relationfield. You must use the [relations] extra in your buildout configuration as stated above, or your site will break with the following error:

AttributeError: type object 'ICatalog' has no attribute '__iro__'

Not entirely unlike

Over the years there have been some packages designed to solve the problem of creating section covers in Plone. We have used and have taken ideas from the following:

CompositePack

Very old; the legacy code is so complex that is not maintainable anymore. It has (arguably) the best user interface of all. Layouts can not be created TTW. Viewlets are just page templates associated with content types; you can drag&drop viewlets around the layout. Publishers love it.

CMFContentPanels

Code is very old, but still maintained (at least works in Plone 4). Allows to create complex layouts TTW and use any layout as a template. Easy to extend and edit (but is terrible to find a content to use). Needs a lot of memory to work and aggressive cache settings.

Collage

Allows the creation of layouts TTW but it has (arguably) the worst user interface of all. It is easily extended and there are several add-ons available that provide new functionality for it.

Home Page Editor of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies Site

Strongly based on Collage, this package was presented at the World Plone Day 2012 Brasilia. It allows editing of home pages and the definition of permissions on blocks of content. Works under Plone 3 only.

collective.panels

A new package that lets site editors add portlets to a set of new locations: above and below page contents, portal top and footer. The package comes with a number of flexible layouts that are used to position the portlets, and locations can be fixed to the nearest site object, to facilitate inheritance. In collective.cover (this package), we don't want to use portlets at all.