This product will add to your Plone control panel a new entry: "Type criterion settings".

From this panel you can add a set of definition about general content types, which are defined using a group of existing Plone native types.

For example: you can define a new general type called "Textual contents" that is defined by grouping Pages, News and Events.

All those definitions can be used in Plone collections by using the new "General type" criteria.

In brief: searching for new general types defined means take a search onto all grouped native types.

I found a lot of Plone users that hardly learn the difference between content types. For example: the difference between a Page and a File is often too tiny in the mind of the site contributor. In other situations a grouping feature (like: "look for all multimedia type") can be useful.

With this approach users can only care about some general family on types that a power user defined.

Finally 3rd party products could extend an existing list on types, and when a content type change (because it has been replaced by another, better product) you only care about reconfiguring the general type, not all the collections in the site.

This product has been tested on Plone 4.3.2, but required plone.app.querystring 1.2 or better.

If you have problems installing this add-on, try to pin plone.app.querystring to version 1.2:

[buildout]
...
versions=versions
...
[versions]
plone.app.querystring = 1.2.0
...

A Generic Setup import step for configuring types.