Advanced sorting features for plone folders
Since plone2.5 we’ve got drag&drop support for sorting items in folder_contents view (as long as your content’s meta_type does not contain spaces ;-).
However, drag an drop has the limitation that in a batched view (20 items per page), you can’t move the item on position 20 to 21. You can swith off batching in folder_contents view in recent versions, and there are also patches that enable drag&drop again (see plone3 user manual and issue 7202).
When handling a lot of items in a container, i can think of other useful options such as “move to top”, “move to bottom”, “move n items up/down” or even “sort alphabetically asc/desc”.
In 2006 i wrote a python script for making this (except of sorting) possible for a customer.
It has been ‘released’ in our public svn repository today and I hope this will make other people’s live easier, too:
https://svn.webmeisterei.com/repos/public/plone-tools/moveObjToPos/trunk/
I’m thinking of a more polished version as a small plone package (maybe even with i18n) and adding support for sorting items alphabetically.
Does anybody know if there are already products available that do the same thing?
Are there plans that plone will support a feature like “show items alphabetically sorted” or “ordered reversed” in a folder’s views?
May 29th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
The folder_position script provides some basic sort support.
http://example.com/path/to/folder/folder_position?position=ordered&id=title
Adding a UI is easy. Extending the script to support reverse ordering would also be trivial.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
It would be really nice to see these features polished up, given some UI, and contributed to trunk for 3.2!
June 4th, 2008 at 9:30 am
@Ricardo: thx for your hint! in this case folder_position does pretty the same (except moving an item up/down)
by operating on the folder instead of the object somebody wants to move (requires the user to know the id of the item).
@Jon: coding this is not the big deal. to get this into 3.2 we’d need a plip with detailed description of the changes, correct?
some ideas:
* batch properties can be set in folder_contents (show 20 per page, all)
* arrows for moving items to top and bottom of the listing in the sorting column
* buttons for sorting items (asc/desc) by changing their objPosInParent (probably with a dropdown to choose which index to sort on)
* probably option on folders how to display items (somehow like atvm simplevocabulary (alph asc/desc, objposinparent)
this might require changes in folder_contents and other templates
August 17th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Not sure if this is entirely relavent, but I wrote some code to implement an iphoto-like slide sorter. All images in the folder are in a grid which resizes with the size of the window. Any image can be drag and dropped to anywhere in the grid. I wrote up what I did at: http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/create-a-2d-image-sorter-based-on-folder_contents-sorting-functionality/?searchterm=slide%20sorter