Tiberiu Ichim: Volto slots, portlets on steroids

Problem: Volto has no equivalent of a viewlet. Solution: slots. They can be management slots, presentation slots, below-footer slots.

One reason: we try not to customize the main template.

Volto also does not have portlets. Well, if you really want them badly enough, you can have them. There is a PR in plone.restapi to export portlets, so you could render them in Volto.

Idea: reuse Volto blocks for layout.

Plone has had portlets for a long time, and it is very useful, especially for smaller sites. You should not have to be a web developer to change the website layout. Portlets give site administrators some power to influence the look of their own site. We should keep that possibility.

Volto's slot proposition:

• Simplify configuration. Portlets in Classic need too many files.
• Volto blocks are very expressive.
• Require Modify Portal Content permission for slots.
• UI Power: give more capabilities: - atomic blocking of parent blocks - override parent blocks

How can we use them?

• Sidebars: listings, info boxes, navigation
• section headers, content

Current status: big PRs on plone.restapi and Volto. Overall the basic functionality is 60-70 percent ready. I will do a live demo.