Site distribution#

Plone creates sites from a distribution: a package that bundles the GenericSetup profiles, the site creation form and the preview image for one kind of site. This add-on registers the distribution surveyjs, which creates a Classic UI Plone site with Privacy Forms Studio / SurveyJS installed — and, on request, with the demo content described in Demo content profile (optional).

What the distribution installs#

Phase	GenericSetup profiles
Base profile (always)	`plone.app.contenttypes:default`, `plone.app.layout:default`, `plonetheme.barceloneta:default`, `zopyx.surveyjs:default`
Example content (`setup_content`)	`zopyx.surveyjs:demo`

The base set mirrors Plone’s built-in classic distribution plus the add-on’s own default profile. Because the example content is the demo profile, a site created with Create Example Content behaves like the demo instance: four SurveyJS themes (light, dark, light-no-panels, dark-no-panels) and a published demo-forms folder with the employee onboarding, customer satisfaction and conference registration forms, each using a different theme. Without example content you get the add-on and nothing else.

Creating a site#

Site creation UI (browser)#

Start Plone and open the site creation UI at the Zope application root, http://localhost:8082/plone-overview (or /ploneAddSite), as a user with the Manager role. The overview lists every registered distribution with its preview image; pick Privacy Forms Studio (SurveyJS) and fill in the form. The fields come from the distribution’s schema.json, so site id and title are prefilled for this kind of site and the Create Example Content switch defaults to on.

REST API#

curl -X POST http://localhost:8082/@sites \
  -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -u admin:password \
  -d '{
        "distribution": "surveyjs",
        "site_id": "surveyjs",
        "title": "Privacy Forms Studio",
        "description": "Forms and surveys with SurveyJS.",
        "default_language": "en",
        "portal_timezone": "Europe/Berlin",
        "setup_content": true
      }'

POST /@sites/surveyjs with the same body works as well; the distribution name then comes from the URL. The service requires the Manager role. A GET on /@sites lists the existing sites.

Programmatic creation (scripts, buildout)#

from Products.CMFPlone.factory import addPloneSite

addPloneSite(
    app,
    "surveyjs",
    title="Privacy Forms Studio",
    description="Forms and surveys with SurveyJS.",
    distribution_name="surveyjs",
    setup_content=True,
    default_language="en",
    portal_timezone="Europe/Berlin",
)

setup_content=False installs the add-on without the demo profile; the demo content can still be added later by applying profile-zopyx.surveyjs:demo (see Demo content profile (optional)).

Distribution data#

File	Purpose
`profiles.json`	`base` (always installed) and `content` (installed with example content) — lists of GenericSetup profile ids
`schema.json`	JSON schema for the site creation form; `default_language` and `portal_timezone` definitions are added by `plone.distribution` at runtime
`image.png`	1080 x 768 preview image shown in the site creation UI
`content/`	not used here — optionally a JSON export (`plone.exportimport`) plus `principals.json`/`portals.json` for distributions that ship content as plain data instead of a profile

The distribution is registered in distributions.zcml with the <plone:distribution> directive of plone.distribution; its data lives in distributions/surveyjs/. Both paths are inside the package (graft src/zopyx in MANIFEST.in), so a plain pip install zopyx.surveyjs already ships the distribution.

Restricting the offered distributions#

The environment variable ALLOWED_DISTRIBUTIONS takes a comma-separated list of distribution names and limits what the site creation UI offers — for example ALLOWED_DISTRIBUTIONS=surveyjs for a deployment whose only purpose is creating Privacy Forms Studio sites.

Tests#

tests/test_distribution.py creates two sites from the distribution in one test layer — one with and one without example content — and asserts the registration, the installed profiles, the seeded themes and the demo-forms folder, and that the demo forms render with their themes.