How do I control the boxes in the left and right columns of Plone?

In the left and right columns of a page, Plone displays different boxes with different content - navigation, login, news, events etc.

But you normally don't want to display all boxes on all pages. So you have two variables which control box (aka. portlet) displays: left_slots and right_slots.

If you enter the Zope Management Console and go to the root of your Plone site and look in the properties tab, you will see an example of how it can look, for example the default left_slots can look like this:

    here/portlet_navigation/macros/portlet
    here/portlet_login/macros/portlet
    here/portlet_about/macros/portlet
    here/portlet_related/macros/portlet

This means that the left slot shows the Navigation, Login, About and Related portlets.

So let's say you want to get rid of the login box. Just remove that line from the list, and press Save Changes. It's that easy.

Great, but I want different behaviour in different folders

Well, that's almost as easy. Let's say you have a folder /download that you want to remove all the boxes in the right column from.

• Enter the folder inside the Zope Management console
• Go to the Properties tab
• At the bottom of the form, add a property called right_slots of the type lines, with no content
• Press Add

Now you have an empty box that overrides the default right column boxes in this folder. And also in the contained folders, so download/old-files will not have the boxes either.

If you have no boxes in a column, Plone will expand to fill the available free space. To add one of the previous boxes to this slot, simply copy one of the path expressions above and paste it into the new right_slots box.

Great, but I only want to apply this to a specific document

To manage the properties on a specific document, you have to add by hand, in the address bar of your browser, /manage_propertiesForm, instead of /manage_metadata. For example for www.plone.org/index_html, you have to put www.plone.org/index_html/manage_propertiesForm. Watch the uppercase in F.

Be aware that the portlets definition would work for that page only; and probably you will have to add the properties left_slots and right_slots, with type lines.

Wonderful, but I want different behaviour for a particular template (valid since Plone 2.0.5)

Again, that's almost as easy. Let's cover the use case present on comments: remove slots from undo_form.

• Customize the portal_skins/plone_forms/undo_form object
• Go to the Properties tab
• At the bottom of the form, add a property called left_slots or right_slots of the type lines, with no content (or containing only the desired ones)
• Press Add

Now you have a custom box that overrides the default columns boxes only in this particular template.

Closing comments

In general it's useful to remove and customize the slots to specific folders - because it causes less clutter, because it gives you more free space when you need it, and because too many CPU-intensive slots can really slow down your site if you do not cache them (the Calendar slot is a particularly nasty slot :).

The available portlets in Plone are by default located in plone_portlets. The ones not starting with portlet_ are the old versions, and will disappar after version 2.0.