Summary

  PloneArticle : A Plone Document that can incorporate images and attachments
  and that allows you to choose from different layout models.

  Behaves mostly like the standard Plone Document type. When you add a Plone
  Article, you can enter the name, title, description and text information.

  When you look at the Plone Article, the images will appear in the right
  column as a thumbnail and optionally with their title. When you click on
  the thumbnail, a popup window will appear with the image at its actual size.
  Attachments will be listed below the article for download in rows of three.

  You will notice two tabs that don't exist on the standard Plone Document:
  images and attachments.

    The Images Tab:

      This interface shows the Images that you have uploaded to the article, and
      allows you to add new images as well as deleting them. Images can have an
      optional title. The position of images as they will appear in the right
      column of the Plone Article View can be changed with up and down arrows
      that allow you to individually move images up or down one step.
    
      Thanks to the ImageTag hotfix, Images are shown as a thumbnail on all
      pages, and only when you click on them, a popup window will appear with
      the original size of the image.
    
    Attachments Tab:
    
      This interface shows the Attachments that you have uploaded to the article,
      and allows you to add new attachments as well as deleting them. If no title
      is given, the name of the uploaded file is taken in its place. 

      Thanks to the ZAAPlugIns product, attachments are shown with their proper icon. 

    The Models Tab:

      Here you can choose from the stock layout models that come with PloneArticle,
      and also the models that you have created somewhere in the skins path.

Installation

  Install PloneArticle with CMFQuickInstaller.

  **PloneArticle depends on the ZAttachmentAttribute and ZAAPlugins products**. 
  They both can be found at http://ingeniweb.sourceforge.net/ .

  PloneArticle can use PIL if it's available: this is transparent for you.


Additional tools

  Articles summary

    A Page Template called 'PloneArticleSummary' is provided as an example to have a
    brief summary of the five most recent published articles in a website, along
    with their first image if available.

  Article tool

    An article tool (portal_article) is installed by the installer. It provides a
    few configuration options so that you can customize PloneArticle's behaviour.

  Lock support

    An optional lock support can be enabled in the article tool. If enabled, any
    authorized user (ie. having edit permission) must LOCK an article to edit it.
    Only the user who locked the article, the Reviewer and the Manager can UNLOCK
    an article. A locked article cannot be edited but apart from this you can
    do anything you want on it.


Performance issues

  PloneArticle has been tuned so 
  that caching is efficient.

  Thumbnail tags

    Thumbnail tags displayed in an article can be cached by a RAMCacheManager,
    for the getThumbTag() PythonScript with 'image_id' as variable parameter.

    The getFirstThumbTag() script can be cached as well, and can be added as a
    metadata in the portal_catalog. This script is only used in PloneArticleSummary
    page template (so if you don't use it it's not necessary to cache it).

    
Addition for new content types developers

  There is a module called BaseArchetypesArticle.py that contains a base class called 'BaseArchetypesArticle'.
  
  If you want to implement an Archetypes-based content type that features images and attachments  la PloneArticle, you just have to 
  subclass this base class into your own product. This requires Plone 2 and Archetypes 1.2.2 or later.

  **Note :** This addition does not impact the PloneArticle content type. You can ignore this module if you don't have the need mentioned above.

  
Further information

  API Documentation:

    See http://ingeniweb.sourceforge.net/Products/PloneArticle/api/PloneArticle.html

  Information about PloneArticle can be found at:

    http://ingeniweb.sourceforge.net/Products/PloneArticle
