Plone: Relative ‘Recent Changes’ Portlets

// under features plone portlets product python

The problem I’ve been faced with today on our Plone systems is that I need to created a ‘Recent Changes’ portlet that’s relative to where the user is on the site.

Now, the standard portlet doesn’t do anything for me, so that’s pretty useless. I had a look at the standard code for the portlet too and it’s not really feasible to try and mess with:

<tal:recentlist define="view here/@@recent_view; results here/results;">

However, using a (nasty?) workaround, if we put the classic Recent Changes portlet into play, we can change that above code in the ZMI to something like:

<tal:recentlist define="view here/@@recent_view;
                        theseResults python:container.portal_catalog(path='/'.join(context.getPhysicalPath()),sort_on='modified',sort_order='reverse');
                        results python:theseResults[:5];">

So, we handle the problem by asking the portal catalog this time, and only wanting stuff that’s under our current physical path. By using the path parameter for the catalog, this works its magic for us. The sub-selection of the array handles cutting back the results.

I noticed that the portlet also has links in its header and footer to ‘/recently_modified’. This would, typically, just give us the everything on the portal, but by making a new page template with a slightly different name, copying the code in from ‘recently_modified’, modifying its results as above, and pointing the portlet’s links at this new page template under our current page:

python:here.absolute_url()+'/relative_recently_modified'

we end up with a nice, relative, recent changes full listing.

It’s a brutal hack, but you could apply the same idea to an actual product and make a real Plone 3 portlet out of this.

Go Top