[Grok-dev] Re: Skinning/themeing

[Martin Aspeli]

Kevin Smith wrote:

> Note, there is no need to create an additional class for viewletmanager 
> here, since we are exercising the common case. When custom 
> viewletmanagers are needed, use viewlets. When dynamic policy and user 
> permissions are important use, plone portlets.

Right. plone.portlets is not so much a flavour of viewlets as it is a 
parallel concept. In plone.portlets, we assume that (a) portlets are 
assigned to locations/users/groups/content types/whatever (b) the 
calculation of which portlets are shown in a particular context is 
dynamic (c) portlet assignments can change at runtime.

That's a bit different to viewlets, which is very much a "compile-time" 
deal (i.e. you configure them as you want and then re-start zope).

plone.portlets is not a good solution for the general case of separating 
elements of UI out into re-usable components, or making UI's pluggable. 
Hopefully, it *is* a good solution if you're buildint portal-like 
applications where you want these things to be dynamic and runtime 
changable.

Martin