Introduction

Collections in Plone are the most powerful tool content editors and site managers have to construct navigation and site sections.

This is a brand new implementation of collections for Plone, using ajax/javascript to make a simpler, easier and streamlined user experience for using collections. Having a more lightweight backend that does not depend on many nested criteria types.

It's designed with simplicity and usability as a main focus, so content editors and site managers can create complex search queries with ease.

Note

This is the dexterity-based version of plone.app.collection. If you are looking for the ATContentTypes-based version that is included in Plone since version 4.2, stay with the 1.x branch of plone.app.collection.

How to add your own criteria to a collection

plone.app.collection and (or more precisely the underlying plone.app.querystring) uses plone.app.registry records to define possible search criteria for a collection.

If you want to add your own criteria, say to choose a value from a custom index, you have to create a plone.app.registry record for this index in your generic setup profile (e.g profiles/default/registry.xml):

<registry>
  <records interface="plone.app.querystring.interfaces.IQueryField"
           prefix="plone.app.querystring.field.department">
    <value key="title">Department</value>
    <value key="description">A custom department index</value>
    <value key="enabled">True</value>
    <value key="sortable">False</value>
    <value key="operations">
        <element>plone.app.querystring.operation.string.is</element>
    </value>
    <value key="group">Metadata</value>
  </records>
</registry>

The title-value refers to the custom index ("Department"), the operations-value is used to filter the items and the group-value defines under which group the entry shows up in the selection widget.

Note

For a full list of all existing QueryField declarations see https://github.com/plone/plone.app.querystring/blob/master/plone/app/querystring/profiles/default/registry.xml#L164

For a full list of all existing operations see https://github.com/plone/plone.app.querystring/blob/master/plone/app/querystring/profiles/default/registry.xml#L1