collective.listingviews allows a Plone site administrator to create new views through the web. They can use this to:

• create custom views of folders or collections that include metadata and content from contained or matching items;
• create custom listing portlets with additional information such as lead images, publication dates or authors;
• create listing views with subqueries or python via TAL expressions;
• create additional views of content items, showing other aspects of the content;
• create portlets to display information about the current item such as last updated date;
• use an ItemView type portlet to display a whole item in a portlet;
• create carousel portlets which pull content or images from collections or folders and apply javascript to them.

Listing Views are designed to be simple to create quickly on a Plone site and avoid the complexity of creating custom page templates or overridden views for many common cases.

View definitions are created inside the Plone Site setup for particular content types. Content editors can apply the views to content items via the Display Menu in a Listing View Portlet (and in the future in a Content Listing Tile).

The HTML markup used by the view is simple and designed to be easily adapted to your needs using CSS or Diazo. Each view consists of:

• a definition list of fields of the content item;
• a list of definition lists of fields for each the items in the folder, or collection items;
• unique CSS classes for the lists and each field type.

By default Fields that can make up a ListingView are:

• Creation Date (Date, Date & Time)
• Creator
• Description
• Effective Date (Date, Date & Time)
• End Date (Date, Date & Time)
• Expiration Date (Date, Date & Time)
• Short Name (with or without Link)
• Size
• Location
• Modification Date (Date, Date & Time)
• State
• Start Date (Date, Date & Time)
• Tags
• Title (with or without Link)
• Total number of comments
• and any custom TAL expressions

See the doctests for a worked example: ./src/collective/listingviews/tests/listingviews.rst

collective.listingviews is an initial attempt to create a Plone plugin that is flexible yet simple to understand. To make it even more useful we need feedback and pull requests to enable it to replace custom Page Templates in more cases, while keeping it easy to understand.

Development is at http://github.com/collective/collective.listingviews

Initial development was funded by PretaWeb.

We have some ideas on where this could go:

• Safe HTML filtering for all fields. Currently not implemented.
• Support plone.app.contentlistingtile for Deco or collective.cover. contentlistingtile allows custom views to be selected so this should be simple.
• Support plone.app.collection. Currently only old-style collections are supported.
• Preview view as ZPT. This provides a way to learn ZPT and a base to start from when more complex views are needed.
• Debug custom fields. Allow selection of content to test fields quickly.
• Migration of views. Provide a way to make bulk changes in content from one listingview to another listingview. This would allow a new "template" to be created and tested and then switched in production.
• Support customisation of batching settings.
• Allow GET requests so that the list can act as a custom search listing page.
• Support grouping.
• Support hierarchical listing. Allow navigation portlets, sitemaps with additional fields. Maybe different kind of views? Maybe allow views to be used as fields within other views?
• Support AJAX batching and infinite lists (auto-load next when scrolled down).
• Reuse TAL on different fields. The TAL becomes a formatter function instead of a field; e.g. convert date or turn Title into link. Functions let you select with fields they apply to, or apply to whole item (i.e. custom field).
• Pre-calculate custom fields, i.e. add them to catalog metadata.