Plone: (Archetypes) Make News Item and Event to be folderish - plone

Question

I see I can use collective.folderishtypes to add new types (folderish) to be used instead of default news item and event. But I want to convert existing news items and events to folderish content types and keep it as simple as possible. Is it possible to override (monkey-patching?) the default types in a simple way (as result to have existing objects with folderish behavior)?
Or what is the good way of solving this issue? I just need existing objects to be solved, too and to have not confusing duplicate content types like: Add new News Item, News Item Folderish... etc. Also, if possible to keep existing listings (like latest events) working.

Answer 1

I have no experience with collective.folderish, the description sounds promising though, too bad it seems not to work for you.
If I needed to solve this and it's not a requirement to keep the histories (workflow- & content-history), I'd go create a new folderish type with the same fields, create for each event and news an instance of the new type and copy the field-values over.
That would change the modification-date, yet could be overcome by copying the mod-date to the publication-date-field (if not used already) and do the 'Latest news/events'-listings with collections sorted by pub-date.
But if you wanted to keep histories and leave mod-date untouched, you could create a folder for each news/event-item, put the item into the folder, set the item as default-view of the folder and rename the folder to the same id as the item. That will make the folder and item appear as one item in the UI and links to the item will not break because the folder is at the destination.
I tested this with a browser-view-script. Alas, adding a folder and moving the item within one script-run does not work for reasons I couldn't track down in short time. So one needs to call the browser-view three times:
from Acquisition import aq_parent, aq_inner
from Products.Five.browser import BrowserView
class View(BrowserView):
report = ''
def __call__(self):
portal = self.context
catalog = portal.portal_catalog
news_items = catalog.searchResults(portal_type='News Item')
event_items = catalog.searchResults(portal_type='Event')
items = news_items + event_items
for i, item in enumerate(items):
self.processItem(item, i, len(items))
return self.report
def processItem(self, item, i, itemsAmount):
item = item.getObject()
item_id = item.id
parent = aq_parent(aq_inner(item))
folder = None
folder_id = item_id + '-container'
if item_id == parent.id:
if i == itemsAmount-1: self.report += '\
Nothing to do, all ' + str(itemsAmount) + ' items have the same id as their parent.'
else:
if parent.id == folder_id:
parent = getParent(parent)
folder = parent[folder_id]
folder.setDefaultPage(item_id)
parent.manage_renameObject(folder.id, item_id)
if i == itemsAmount-1: self.report += '\
Step 3/3: Renamed ' + str(itemsAmount) + ' folder-ids.'
else:
try:
folder = addFolder(parent, folder_id)
if i == itemsAmount-1: self.report += '\
Step 1/3: Added ' + str(itemsAmount) + ' folders.'
folder.setTitle(item_id) # set same title as item has
folder.reindexObject()
except:
folder = parent[folder_id]
try:
cutAndPaste(item, folder)
if i == itemsAmount-1: self.report += '\
Step 2/3: Moved ' + str(itemsAmount) + ' items into folders.'
except:
pass
def addFolder(parent, folder_id):
parent.invokeFactory('Folder', folder_id)
folder = parent[folder_id]
folder.setTitle(folder_id)
folder.reindexObject()
return folder
def cutAndPaste(item, folder):
""" Move item into folder. """
parent = aq_parent(aq_inner(item))
clipboard = parent.manage_cutObjects([item.id])
folder.manage_pasteObjects(clipboard)
folder.reindexObject()
def getParent(item):
return aq_parent(aq_inner(item))
Disclaimers:
You need to do this procedure also every time a new event/news-item is created, with an event-listener.
It would be better to create new event-listeners for each step of the process and start the next one when the preceding step has ended.
The temporary-id for the folder (composed of item-id and the arbitrary suffix "-container") is assumed to not exist already within the parent of an item. Although it is very unlikely to happen, you might want to grab that exception in the script, too.

Answer 2

I have not tested this, but based on the collective.folderishtypes documentation ("How to migrate non-folderishtypes to folderish ones") you should be able to call the ##migrate-btrees view on your Plone site root to migrate non-folderish content types to folderish.
Warning: do a backup of the database before attempting the migration, and test in development environment first before applying this on production data.