Creating Folders

Creating folders was easy. Even changing the order they are displayed in was easy. Just use the Contents view of the root folder then drag and drop sub-folders and documents into the desired order.

But there were three folders that were a challenge: Events, News, and Members.

Events

Events, no matter where they are created, appear on the calendar portlet. But the Events folder is a smart folder. I didn't want the event documents scattered all over the Plone site, and you're not allowed to create events in the Events folder itself. In fact, you can only put smart folders inside of smart folders.

Ultimately, I created an 'events-items' folder in the HQ folder. Volunteers who are adding events should put them in this folder. I need to set the "add item" control for all other folders now to disallow adding events, to enforce this. This is pretty easy to do for each folder, but I haven't seen where to change the site-wide defaults. Folders can inherit these settings, but by default the use the site-wide defaults.

I also modified the default view of Events. It used to show the creation date of events, which is useless. Now it has a tabular view of event title, type (a keyword), and start date.

It's also helpful to go to 'Site Setup -> Navigation' and turn off displaying 'CMF Events' and 'Events', so they don't show up in the navigation tree.

News

News is also a smart folder, and has the same basic challenges as the Events folder. I've created a 'news-items' folder, and need to now restrict "add item" in all the other folders.

It's also helpful to go to 'Site Setup -> Navigation' and turn off displaying 'CMF News Item' and 'News Item', so they don't show up in the navigation tree.

Members

I have a hard time figuring out the purpose of this folder. It basically houses documents users have uploaded into their member folder. Perhaps it's a great place for draft content. But there's not really a process for selecting the "best of" material from member's folders and listing it on the home page. The first step is to remove it from navigation.

I created a Smart Folder called 'user posts'. The criteria are published pages and links from the Members folder. This allows anybody to publish articles. I purposely didn't selected folders, so members can arrange their content however they'd like, but the folders don't show up in the 'user posts' view.

If you read an article while authenticated on the site, it will show you the author. Clicking that will take you to a profile page for the author, and provides a link to the author's member folder. So there's still a way to reach their content, including their public draft content.

Tabs

Instead of having the tabs mirror the top navigation of the site, I decided I would use tabs to shortcut to things of high interest, like campaigns. Thus, many of the tabs will change over time. This way I could create a site hierarchy that was a little bit deeper, like putting all candidates in an "offices" folder. It was tempting to put them at the root so they'd be just one click away, but using tabs for this gave me the best of both worlds.

• In Site Setup/Navigation, I turned off automatic tab creation.
• On each folder that I wanted a tab, I turned it on via Edit.
• Through the ZMI, I created the additional tabs I needed.