Cool future feature: sidebar_slots
27-November-2004
permalink email thisWe need in the next few days to have at least a mock-up of using blogs in 'team-tasks' for demonstrating in a couple of our project sites ( team-tasks are knownet's first stab at a goal-directed discussion and resource-development component, not yet productised ). One feature of our current ad-hoc implementations of team-tasks - which do not use weblogs - is a special tool which appears everywhere in the task's content and interfaces, for switching between the discussions, resources, and seed-content. I'd like to have a simple way to get that kind of context-sensitive tool into weblogs.
A natural solution would be to do as the Plone folks did with 'left_slots' etc... a machinery to marshall all the content specified in a ZMI-editable property, fetching content from macros in context. This would be a great way to add sidebar elements to weblogs. In fact it would be a great way to handle the customisation of the sidebar in general. We could have an omnibus macro to call which assembles all the default sidebar elements, which could optionally be replaced as a ZMI property by a series of finer-grained macros for individual elements. This would make it a lot easier for site-admininstrators to customise ( I had envisaged this happening by their customising the sidebar_macros template). The only things I do not like about this are
- the way that the entire slots property would be what acquisition noticed, rather than individual elements - though this could be overcome by combining slots customisation with template customisation within content
- the oddities of trying to combine this with user-configurable slots - I suspect that we could make sense of this by having a hierarchy of macro calls, with some common sidebar elements combined in one macro, to effect a mix of fine-grained customisation and sensible acquisition of sitewide defaults or higher-level content-area customisations.
The only other problem is that I never did figure out how the magic of slot marshalling happens, but I suspect it can be done with a wee bit of python :O)
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