Plone 5 Action Portlets not working as I would expect

  1. this first demo site of mine shows an action portlet acting
    as I would expect. It is the site actions portlet and displays
    what I would expect.
    https://www.docentims.com/

  2. the second site has control panel action portlet. (see screen shot at end of post)
    Nothing shows
    http://mckennariley.webfactional.com/DocentIMS
    ===============
    I can't find anything in docs.plone.org explaining what each portlet should do, I don't know
    what to expect.

Suggestions?

This is a summary of testing each action portlet.

Control panel: - nothing is shown in the portlet
Folder: - nothing is shown in the portlet
Global: - nothing is shown in the portlet
Object: - displays same content as in the user panel when log in.
Object_buttons: - nothing is shown in the portlet
Portal tabs: - displays top level tabs in the portlet
Site_actions: - displays site actions (e.g. site map, accessibility)
User: - shows same options as shown when logged in and looking at your button
Workflow: - nothing is shown in the portlet
Collection: - the collection shows, but why does the collection folder itself display in the portlet?

@rileydog,

As far as I understand it, the action portlet is meant to show categories of actions as defined by the portal_actions tool. All of those actions have permissions set on them which determine if they are visible or not.

I think the vocabulary that feeds the set of categories may be suspect, as it lists 'workflow' actions as an available set, but I don't think there are actually any workflow actions described either by the workflow tool, or by the portal_actions tool.

I agree, some documentation of what each of these action categories is and what you should expect to see would be good. I suspect that no-one has yet had the time to write this documentation. Perhaps you could do some investigation and begin adding this documentation to docs.plone.org? It would be a most welcome contribution!

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Cris, I would be happy to do this, that is what the little table in above post was the start.

So, How can I contact the people who put in this action portlet (it is new to P5) so I can understand what they were trying to achieve?

Is there a place for me to post a note explaining I would like to add/improve documentation on these portlets but would like to hear from the person who added these portlets. Then I can create good documentation.

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The way I would track down those responsible :wink: would be to go through the github.com repo and see who made the first commit for the relevant lines of code. :smile:

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@rileydog,

Here's the history of the actions portlet file in the plone.app.portlets package:

It shows the original author and the committers that have helped since. I would reach out to them directly to offer end-user documentation of the portlet. I'm sure they'd be happy to help you understand the purpose, the intended use-cases, and the proper expectations for the portlet in exchange for writing that information up and contributing it to docs.plone.org. As for contributing the documentation you write, I would reach out to @svx who is leading the charge on improving Plone documentation. He should be able to help you find out what to do with what you write.

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Thanks Cris, I posted a commit in github referencing back here. I said I would like to help the Plone community by documenting these portlets and asked if they would help me understand the expected functionality of the portlet

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