Plone Mosaic is a site builder and layout solution for Plone.

Read this introduction and the package documentation for more details how to use this package.

Mosaic, Blocks and Tiles provide a simple, yet powerful way to manage the pages on your Plone website. At their core, they rely on semantic HTML and resources with valid, publishable URLs.

Mosaic Editor editor is a visual editor for pages rendered using Blocks. It relies on a grid system to place tiles onto a page in an intuitive, WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop manner. Using Mosaic Editor, it is easy to compose pages with complex, balanced and visually appealing layouts.

Currently, the Mosaic Editor is activated, when any content with Mosaic layout view active is being edited. (Mosaic layout is available for any content with Layout support behavior enabled.)

Blocks is a rendering algorithm based on HTML markup conventions. A page managed by Mosaic Editor is stored as a simple HTML document. It is representing the actual content of that page as a standalone, publishable resource devoid of any site layout content (e.g. global navigation elements). This is referred to as content layout.

Tiles represent the dynamic portions of a page. At its most basic level, a tile is simply an HTML document with a publishable URL.

In practice, tiles are usually implemented as browser views deriving from the Tile base class and registered with the <plone:tile /> ZCML directive. This allows tiles to have some basic metadata and automatically generated edit forms for any configurable aspects, which Mosaic will expose to users. See plone.tiles for examples.

When work with tiles in Mosaic Editor, there are three types of tiles:

Text tiles

Static HTML markup (WYSIWYG-edited text) placed into the content or site layout. Strictly speaking, text tiles are not tiles in that they do not involve any tile fetching or merging - instead they are stored as part of the page or site layout. To the user, however, a text tile can be moved around and managed like any other.

Field tiles

Render the value of a metadata field such as the title or description. The values of field tiles may be edited in-place in the page, but the value is stored in the underlying field and can be indexed in the catalog, used for navigation and so on. In practice, a field tile is an instance of the special tile plone.app.standardtiles.fields with the field name passed as a parameter.

App tiles

Any other type of dynamic tile. Examples may include a folder listing, a media player, a poll or pretty much anything else you can think of.

Advanced mode

If you press the "alt" key you will be shown the layout structure, labels for your tiles and css classes for rows.

Custom classes on rows

Also in the advanced mode, you're able to add custom classes on rows by double clicking the displayed row class.

Subcolumns

In order to nest columns inside a cell, drag a tile, then press the "ctrl" key and drop the tile close to an existing one, either before or after it, in accordance to the shown insert marker.

Fluid rows

For fluid (full width) rows select any tile in the row and choose "Fluid" from the "Format" menu. Fluid row styles only make sense on pages without portlets. In Plone 5.1.3 we can check that automatically (with plone.app.layout 2.8.0) and those styles are only active if no portlet columns are shown.

Plone Mosaic is installed by building a Plone site with package plone.app.mosaic and activating its Plone Mosaic add-on.

The dependencies are already version pinned in Plones ecosystem.

After the add-on activation, the new content layout and editor support can be enabled for any content type by enabling behaviors Layout support and Drafting support.

Note for Plone 5.1:

Since version 2.2.x the renamed IRichTextBehavior behavior is used from plone.app.contenttypes >= 2.0.0 to keep the Plone 5.1 compatibility pin plone.app.contenttypes to 2.0.2.

However, if a newer version of mosaic is needed, the good known set for the version can be found at Github, Mosaic Code repository, in the file versions.cfg

An example buildout.cfg for Plone 5.1.x with plone.app.mosaic 2.2.x could look like this:

[buildout]
extends =
    https://dist.plone.org/release/5.1-latest/versions.cfg
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plone/plone.app.mosaic/master/versions.cfg

parts =
    instance
    ...

[instance]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
eggs =
    Plone
    plone.app.mosaic

...

Plone 5:

Clone and build:

$ git clone https://github.com/plone/plone.app.mosaic
$ cd plone.app.mosaic
$ python3.7 -m venv .
$ ./bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
$ ./bin/buildout

For Python 2.7 do exactly the same but create a virtualenv with:

$ virtualenv .

instead of:

$ python3.7 -m venv .

Startup:

$ ./bin/instance fg

Get started:

• open a browser at http://localhost:8080/
• create a Plone Site (user admin, pass admin)
• on the Welcome to Plone select the new entry Mosaic layout from the Display-menu
• click Edit to see the new Mosaic Editor

Plone 4:

Development for plone.app.mosaic has moved to Plone 5 and Python 3. To use plone.app.mosaic in Plone4 please use the related release on https://pypi.org

Build the bundle with:

$ npm install
$ bower install
$ make clean all watch

Plone Mosaic can be developed with Webpack running:

$ make watch_theme

or starting the instances either manually or with make watch_instance and starting the Webpack development server with:

$ make watch_webpack

Once you have activated theme called Plone Mosaic, the editor will be reloaded and rebuilt by Webpack development server after each filesystem change.

To script screenshots into the Sphinx documentation, use the development buildout:

$ git clone https://github.com/plone/plone.app.mosaic
$ cd plone.app.mosaic
$ make bin/buildout
$ make bin/instance

To speed up your iterations, before compiling the docs, start the robot server with:

$ bin/robot-server plone.app.mosaic.testing.PLONE_APP_MOSAIC_ROBOT -v

With robot-server running, you can re-build the docs' screenshots relatively fast with:

$ bin/robot-sphinx docs html

Or simply run the embedded screenshots as robot tests from a single document with:

$ bin/robot docs/getting-started.rst

or with phantomjs:

$ bin/robot -v BROWSER:phantomjs docs/getting-started.rst

and open ./report.html to view the test report.

Just add Debug keyword anywhere to pause the robot in the middle of the screenshot script and drop you into a Robot Framework REPL.