Contents
collective.spaces is a simple way of creating mini-sites within the Plone
CMS, with each mini-site based on a fully-customisable template.
This product deploys a light-weight Dexterity-based content type
(called a Space
) within Plone and provides various additions that would
be useful in a self-managed, collaborative environment. For instance:
- Ability for users to self-create Spaces
- Each Space appears as a sub-site
- Customisable logo per-Space
- Ability for site administration to customise a template used for new Spaces
- Simple Dexterity-based content type
- Web-based forms built using
plone.app.z3cform
and friends - Leverages existing Plone tech (such as authentication, INavigationRoot and Dexterity behaviours) on offer.
- Other options (such as
collective.lineage
) provide unnecessary features or else introduce extra dependencies
- Desire to allow various groups of users to collaborate but without administrative overhead/intervention
- Users should be able to create new sub-sites at the Plone root, without the need for administrative intervention
- Each workspace should be able to be self-managed
- Each workspace can be allowed limited customisation
- Workspaces should be all contained within a single Plone site
- Desire for a template to be easily customisable, with arbitrary content attached within Plone.
collective.spaces
is compatible with recent version of Plone and is
tested with Plone 4.2 and Dexterity 1.2.1. Add this egg to your Plone
instance in your buildout like so -- it's highly recommended that
you utilise a Known Good Set (KGS) for pinning versions of the form
libraries and Dexterity:
[buildout] extends = ... http://good-py.appspot.com/release/dexterity/1.2.1?plone=4.2b2 ... [instance] ... eggs = collective.spaces
ZCML registration is not necessary as this egg includes a
z3c.autoinclude
entry point. Once you have added this to your buildout,
re-run your ./bin/buildout
script.
- Once buildout has completed, restart your Plone instance.
- Load and login to your Plone instance, and go to Add-ons under Site Setup.
- Locate
collective.spaces
in the add-ons list and Activate it. - Once complete, notice that:
- There is Create new Space in your personal tools menu
- A Space Template exists at the root of your portal
- Site Administrators and Managers can manually add Space content anywhere
By default:
- All logged-in users (
Authenticated
) have the ability to create new Spaces via the Create a new Space form (/@@create-space
). - Only Site Administrators and Managers can manually create Spaces via the Add new menu. Regular users, including Contributor users, cannot do this.
To change these defaults, load the Manage Access ZMI page
(for instance, http://localhost:8080/Plone/manage_access
) and change the
roles associated with the relevant collective.spaces
permissions. You can
also use a GenericSetup profile in an extension product to modify these
permissions (rolemap.xml
in your profile).
Whilst this product is opinionated regarding aspects like default security permissions, a configurator can use the rest of Plone's functionality to enhance Spaces (and reduce administration overhead). Some examples are:
- Authentication
- Enable user self-registration on Plone or enable another authentication mechanism to reduce administrative input needed (or both). Intertwining mechanisms like local authentication, LDAP, CAS, or Shibboleth can easily mean that users can self-manage collaboration with local and external users.
- Navigation
- If users are expected to be creating many Spaces, then the Plone portal
tabs will quickly consume lots of space. To combat this, simply either turn
off the
Automatically generate tabs
option in theNavigation settings
control panel, or else de-select theSpace
content type from theDisplayed content types
option. If using this latter strategy, then consider how users will actually access their Space - hiding from navigation entirely likely means users need directly access their URL. - Email notification
- A common situation may be where a site administrator wants to keep track of the Spaces being created. A Plone Content Rule is provided with this add-on to satisfy this use case. Using this Rule is completely optional -- it is installed but not enabled by default.
Source code is available within the collective GitHub at https://github.com/collective/collective.spaces for submission of issues, fixes, and improvements.
- Products.CMFPlacefulWorkflow is currently incompatible due to policy traversal leading to an infinite loop when performing actions like adding or modifying comments on content. This issue is present with version 1.5.9 and caused by this loop: Products/CMFPlacefulWorkflow/adapter.py (line 71)
- Tests for email notification content rule (when enabled)
- Handle issues with displaying ID field - can we sanely present users
the ability to change their Space ID? In standard Plone machinery, being
able to rename content in a context depends upon having the
Copy or Move
permission on the folder context.