[Zope-CMF] Add forms and menus

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi folks,

I see that Yuppie has been experimenting with add forms. From what I can 
tell, he's using a custom formlib base class and registering views as 
e.g. addFile.html. It also look as if he's registering that view as an 
action in portal_actions, in the 'folder' category.

Plone currently supports add forms for the IAdding (+) view in a 
somewhat ugly way (it looks to see if there's a view for IAdding with 
the same name as the 'factory' set in the FTI of an addable type, and if 
so, provides a link to it). IAdding can be a bit painful, so we're 
interested in supporting an approach based on simple views.

It's also worth noting that z3c.form (via plone.z3cform, which should be 
plain CMF compatible, though you may want a different default template) 
has support for such views in quite a generic way. The "CMF" version of 
that looks like this:

http://dev.plone.org/plone/browser/plone.z3cform/trunk/plone/z3cform/add.py

z3c.form is generally nicer to work with than formlib.

In any case, I'd like to know why you went down the portal_actions route 
for rendering the add links. I'm not quite sure I like the idea of 
having this be persistent configuration, separate to the FTI, as the two 
would need to be kept in sync, and in sync with the view name registered 
in ZCML.

Also, why not try to use the Zope 3 menu concept? There's even a special 
"add menu" directive.

I'd quite like to find a good approach here that can be used by both 
Plone and plain CMF, if possible.

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book