Products.Carousel 1.0b2

Carousel allows you to add user-configurable rotating banners to any section of a Plone site.

Introduction

Carousel is a tool for featuring a rotating set of banner images in any section of your Plone site. Features:

• Different sets of banners can be used in different sections of the site.

• Banners can link to another page in the site, or an external URL.

• Banners rotate via a simple fade effect every 8 seconds. This is implemented using the jQuery javascript library which is included with Plone, so it’s pretty lightweight.

• Clicking on the title of a banner jumps to it immediately.

• Images will not rotate while the mouse cursor is hovering over the Carousel.

Compatibility

Carousel requires Plone 3.0 or greater, mainly because it renders itself in a viewlet.

Installation

Add Products.Carousel to your buildout’s list of eggs, and re-run buildout.

Start up Zope and go to Site Setup, Add-on Products in your Plone site, and install the Carousel product.

Detailed overview and tests

Configuring a Carousel banner folder

The items displayed by Carousel are known as “Carousel Banners” and can exist within a “Carousel Folder” in any section of the site. For purposes of demonstration, let’s add a Carousel folder to the root of the site.

Carousel folders are a matter of configuration more than content, so they don’t appear on the Add menu. Instead, there is a ‘Configure banners’ tab. Clicking it while within a section that doesn’t yet have a Carousel folder will result in the creation of a new one:

>>> browser.open('http://nohost/plone')
>>> browser.getLink('Configure banners').click()
>>> browser.url
'http://nohost/plone/carousel'

The new folder should now provide the ICarouselFolder interface:

>>> from Products.Carousel.interfaces import ICarouselFolder
>>> ICarouselFolder.providedBy(self.portal.carousel)
True

If, on the other hand, we’re in a folder that already has a Carousel folder, the existing one will be used:

>>> browser.goBack()
>>> browser.getLink('Configure banners').click()
>>> browser.url
'http://nohost/plone/carousel'

And if we try to configure banners while we’re already doing so, nothing should change:

>>> browser.getLink('Configure banners').click()
>>> browser.url
'http://nohost/plone/carousel'

Adding a Carousel banner

Now that we’re within the Carousel folder, we can add a Carousel banner using the add menu:

>>> browser.getLink('Carousel Banner').click()
>>> browser.url
'http://nohost/plone/carousel/portal_factory/Carousel Banner/carousel_banner.../edit'

We can set various things including a title, target URL, and image:

>>> browser.getControl('Title').value = 'Pirates and Cowboys agree: Ninjas suck'
>>> browser.getControl('URL').value = 'http://www.plone.org'
>>> browser.getControl(name='image_file')
<Control name='image_file' type='file'>
>>> browser.getControl('Save').click()
>>> 'Changes saved.' in browser.contents
True

Viewing the banners

Now if we return to the home page, where we initially configured the banners, the banner we just added should be rendered (before the tabs):

>>> browser.open('http://nohost/plone')
>>> browser.contents
<BLANKLINE>
...Pirates and Cowboys...
...class="contentViews"...

Change history

Changelog

1.0b2 (2009-02-04)

• Declare dependency of our custom GS import step on the viewlets step. [davisagli]

• Separate the (globally-registered) template from the (locally-registered) viewlet, so that the former can be customized using portal_view_customizations. [davisagli]

• Added banner description to the template. Changed the ‘carousel-title’ class to ‘carousel-button’ so I could split out ‘carousel-title’ and ‘carousel-description’. [davisagli]

• Fix duplicate entries in quick installer. [davisagli]

• Handle non-structural folders correctly. [davisagli]

1.0b1 (2009-02-03)

• Initial release. [davisagli]

Contributors

• David Glick [davisagli], ONE/Northwest, Author