Useful products

Recommended extensions and add-ons for your Plone installation, including some advice and hacks.

ListingPages

ListingPages at PloneProducts

In theory Topics can do just about everything you would ever need to do as regards dynamically aggregating content. In practice, they seem to be rarely used. (Neither of the three Plone books spends more than a page on Topics, with one simply listing it as an available content type. Instructions on using them are scant, save for the outdated doc files within the CMFTopic Product. For simple cases, configuration is fiddly. Finally, the physical presentation of Topics is ugly.)

Fortunately, ListingPages cover the simpler cases where you just need to produce a page that is a list of defined content. Selection criteria can be based on type, state and location (the current folder down or the whole site).

GOTCHA: Although the "Page size" option (controlling pagination) says it can be left blank or set to 0 to turn pagination off, in fact a blank entry gives rise to an error in view mode.

GOTCHA: To batch a large list of items (i.e. have it grouped automatically into several pages) set "Page size" must be set to something non-zero and "Number of items" to 0 or something larger than "Page size". (This is in the Product instructions, but I was able to miss it and get confused.)

POSSIBLE BUG: I've had variable results using the keywords in list setup. Caveat user.

PloneLoginHistory

PloneLoginHistory at ContentManagementSoftware.Info

Need to know when (or if) your users are logging in? Suspicious that someone has been logging into your account? Look no further.

RichDocument

RichDocument at ContentManagementSoftware.Info

RichDocument is a few grades better than the default document type in Plone because it allows the more flexible restructured text format. (2.1 Plone documents now allo