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

Flexitopic integrates the easy use of plone collections with a Flexigrid AJAX view. The criteria from the topic are taken to construct a simple query form to narrow down a search inside a collection. Subtopics are displayed inside tabs of the collection.

    * Flexitopic does not install a new content type but just adds an additional view to the collection type.
    * it degrades for non javascript browsers to a simple table - (almost) same usability, no information loss.
    * it requires JQuery only (built into plone 4) no JQuery UI
    * lightweight JS
          * Flexigrid: 24 KB packed
          * Slider 15 KB packed


Usage
=====

Add a collection. The Criteria of the collection will be used to build a form to narrow down your search inside the collection. If the criterion (the index in portal_catalog) is sortable you can sort this column. Not all criteria types can be used as input for Flexicollection so beware.

    * Search Text: full text search inside the collections. If you leave the criterion value empty users can search for content containing that text, if the value is not empty it will search for this text plus the text the user supplied.
    * Title: search or sort by title (see above)
    * Description: search description only (search see above, no sorting here!)
    * Dates (effective, created, ...):  will be converted to  date ranges and can be selected with the JQuery Slider Plugin)
    * Location (path index): will not be displayed in the search form and always be applied to the query
    * Keyword Indices (like tags): a drop down list will be generated to narrow the search down
          * if the criterion operator is AND the list will contain all unique values of the index minus the ones you selected, the query will search for all terms that match your criteria plus the user input
          * if the criterion is OR the terms you selected will be display in the selection list. the search will be for the user supplied input only

The output is always a table with the fields you supplied in the 'Table Columns' of the collection, no matter if 'Display as Table' is checked or not.

Subtopics:

Flexitopic will display subtopics as tabs on top of the page. The first tab is the description of the topic, subtopics will occupy the following tabs. Subtopics will always be displayed as (plain html) tables defined by the criteria,  'Table Columns' and the 'Number of Items' of the subtopic.

