Displaying body text of a news item in sdotnews

Who says a technical site can’t have pictures? (Photo:Kedar Misani )

Sdotnews by default displays the description of a news item. However, sometimes you will want to link to another page direct from the front sdotnews page, so it might be better to display the body text instead of the description, and in the body text of the news item you can then insert your links.

In order to implement this change we have to change the sdotnews_view template; specifically, replacing the bit that says

<p tal:content="result/Description">

At first I tried to call the text of the page body using

<p tal:content="result/getText">

or

<p tal: content="python: result.CookedBody()">

But this doesn’t work, because once sdot has batched the news articles in groups so they can be displayed on different pages, the page results can access the metadata listed in the catalog, (so result/Description or result/Title is ok, but result/getText isn’t).

Now, to get around this, you can include the page body in the catalog metadata (which would defeat the whole purpose of having a catalog in the first place), or else you can use the getObject method to access the obkjct and all of its attributes, rather than just the ones specified in the catalog.

tal:define="resultObject result/getObject;
            resultText python:resultObject.CookedBody(stx_level=2);

 <p tal:replace="structure resultText">

Note that sdot news already has defined resultObject, which it needed to access the news item image. Also note the structure command, this converts the HTML or ReStructured text. If you just put in

<p tal:content="resultText">

you will just get all the HTML tags.