Restricting Plone portlets to show up only on certain pages

Sometimes you may want certain Plone portlets to only show up on certain pages. This guide will walk you through doing exactly that.

If the portlets already appear on your site, you’ll need to remove the portlet calls from the site properties page. In the Zope Management Interface, click on the name of your site at the top of the left-hand navigation bar. Then click on the properties tab at the top of the right-hand pane, and you’ll see a list of properties. The two important ones are left_slots and right_slots. These contain lists of portlets you want to show up in the left and right panes, respectively, of your site. Remove the lines referring to the portlets you want to appear only on certain pages. Remember to click the “Save Changes” button near the bottom when you finish.

To get portlets to appear conditionally, we are going to manually add in code to the main template that references the portlets. If you have a customized main_template file in your custom folder, edit that. If not, create a customized version of main_template, found in /portal_skins/portal_templates. Find where you want the portlets to appear, and insert this code in the appropriate spot:

<div tal:condition="python: context.id in ('welcome', 'news')">
@

@
</div>

The first div element is used to conditionally filter the pages that the portlet shows up on. Replace ('welcome', 'news') with a Python-style list (that is, strings separated by commas) of the IDs of the pages where you want the portlet to appear.

The second div calls the portlet code. Replace portlet_news in the above path expression with the name of the portlet you want. The text inside the div (in this case, “News”) is just a placeholder and can be anything you want.

You only need one outer div (with the tal:condition code), provided your conditional portlets are going to go in the same area. Just add an inner div with the appropriate metal:use-macro attribute for each portlet. Calling portlets in this way also gives you the freedom to place them anywhere you like, not just in the pre-defined left and right parts of the screen.

Say you only want the News portlet to appear and nothing else, you can use a filler portlet, one that you know is not in use. For example: here/portlet_related/macros/portlet.

But what about the pages you that you didn’t the filler to show up (for example, you have the portlet set to show up on the left hand side, but for the pages without the portlet, the text should be flushed left). It’s a little tedious, but go to the folders in the ZMI that you want the filler portlet to be removed from. Go to the Properties tab. At the bottom of the form, add a property called left_slots, with lines as the type and no content. Press add. Also, anything that is a child of the folder will also carry this property.