.. contents:: **Table of contents**

Introduction
============

Add to Plone a way to manage site **portal tabs** using the Plone interface and hiding common
syntax difficulties you can find in ZMI.

When you need this
------------------

You need this product when you want to give to your non-technical users the ability to
manage the *portal tabs* section of your Plone site.

Going deeply:

* you don't want (or you can't) that your power user will need to go to ZMI
  (for example, the Plone 4.1 "*Site Administrator*" role can't)
* you still want to make them able to manage portal tabs
* your users don't know nothing about TAL and python, and commonly want only to add static
  links to the site
* your additional tabs don't need advanced features like condition for being seen, or permissions
  (for this, you can still go to ZMI)

When you don't need this
------------------------

If you only need to port into Plone interface the "*portal_action*" tool customizationthis is not your
product. Try to check `quintagroup.plonetabs`__ instead.

__ http://pypi.python.org/pypi/quintagroup.plonetabs/

How to use
==========

First note
----------

This product only manage portal tabs that are not automatically generated from Plone. For this
reason, a warning message is displayed if the "*Automatically generate tabs*" option is selected
in the "*Navigation settings*" panel.

Handling tabs
-------------

From the "*Site Setup*" panel, go to the new "*Manage portal tabs*" link you'll find after the
product installation.

.. image:: http://keul.it/images/plone/collective.portaltabs-0.1.0a-1.png
   :alt: View of the Site Setup panel

The "*Portal Tabs settings*" view is composed by two section; the first one for make changes to
existing tabs (and also order and delete them), and the second for adding new tabs.

.. figure:: http://blog.redturtle.it/pypi-images/collective.portaltabs/collective.portaltabs-0.3.0-02.png/image_preview
   :target: http://blog.redturtle.it/pypi-images/collective.portaltabs/collective.portaltabs-0.3.0-02.png/
   :alt: Manage portal tabs panel view

Newly created tab only need two kind of information: the name of the tab to be displayed (title)
and the URL. When creating a tab you can also handle the id of the tab, or this will be
automatically generated.

What I can write inside an URL section?
---------------------------------------

The product try to hide some of the too-technical feature you have available in the ZMI
portal_actions tool management, however all features are still there.

* to create an absolute link to something, just type the link (e.g: "http://foo.org")
* when you need to create links to URL inside the site, just type "``/folder/foo``"
  (note that this path *can* be a content path, but no check are done at all)
* TAL espression are still available, but you need to start them with a "``tal:``"
* Python expression are still available, but you need to start them with a "``python:``"
* inside an URL, you can still use TALES expressions in the normal form "``${foo1/foo2/...}``"

For security reason, usage on "``python:``", "``tal:``" and in-string TALES with "``$``" are protected
by another permissions "*collective.portaltabs: Use advanced expressions*", given only to *Manager* role.

Manage additional actions categories
------------------------------------

You can use collective.portaltabs to handle also other CMF action categorie than "*portal_tabs*".
To do this you need to configure what other categories can be handled accessing the
"*@@manage-portaltabs-categories*" settings page.

.. figure:: http://blog.redturtle.it/pypi-images/collective.portaltabs/collective.portaltabs-0.3.0-03.png/image_preview
   :target: http://blog.redturtle.it/pypi-images/collective.portaltabs/collective.portaltabs-0.3.0-03.png/
   :alt: Categories to be handled

All entries must match a CMF action category that exists.
Going back to the "*Portal Tabs settings*" make possible to handle also those new actions

.. figure:: http://blog.redturtle.it/pypi-images/collective.portaltabs/collective.portaltabs-0.3.0-04.png/i