Inside Volto#

As with any large complex application, there are multiple facets to Volto, and some of them may be strange or unfamiliar to developers used only to Plone classic development. But, if viewed in the context of the wider modern frontend development world, Volto is no longer a strange beast.

To list some of the things that Volto is:

  • A Single Page Application, based on React that runs in client browsers

  • An Express-powered HTTP server that can completely generate full HTML pages server-side. See the Server Side Rendering chapter for more.

  • A CMS UI to interact with Plone, the backend

  • An extensive, extensible development API to easily develop custom websites and capabilities for the CMS UI

There are two ways of running Volto:

  • Standalone (to develop Volto itself)

  • as a Volto Project (for your own custom use, to develop a new website).

Running Volto standalone is simple: make a clone of Volto from Github, run yarn to download its dependencies, then yarn start to simply start Volto. This is useful for developing Volto, but it is not the way to use it, if you want to develop your own custom Volto website.

The second method of running Volto is to use the Volto App generator and bootstrap (based on a fixed scaffolding) a new JavaScript package that can piggy-back on Volto and treat it as a library. We call this the "Volto project".

The next steps, after bootstrapping the new Volto project, is to make it your own. The community has settled, for now, to use Yarn Classic as the default JavaScript package manager, so, to add dependencies on new third-party JavaScript packages, you'd run:

yarn add react-slick

to make the react-slick library available to your Volto project.

You can use this Volto Project scaffold to develop a complete Volto-powered website, without needing to do anything else. You can use the <root>/src/ folder to host your custom JavaScript code and the <root>/theme folder to customize the Volto theme and create your custom look and feel.

But to enable a greater modularity and reusability of code, you can create new JavaScript packages that are deeply integrated with Volto, the so-called "Volto addons".

Volto codebase#

Looking inside Volto's source code, we find several points of interest:

  • server.js, start-server.js and the express-middleware folders contain code for the Express HTTP server, with the counterparts client.js and start-client.jsx for the browser client bundle.

  • the components folder is the biggest, with two separate branches: theme and manage. The theme folder hosts components that are more basic and are always available to the anonymous visitors, while the manage branch hosts more advanced components, the CMS UI, blocks, widgets, etc.

  • store.js, middleware, actions and the reducers are the centralized data store. See the Redux chapter for more details.

  • registry.js and the config folder will constitute the Volto configuration registry, a deep JavaScript object that holds settings and configuration. The registry can be altered by Volto projects and Addons. It doesn't have the fancy features of the component registry of ZCA, but it's easier to reason and easily inspectable.

  • the theme.js and the parent folder theme are Volto's Pastanaga theme, materialized as a Semantic-UI theme.

Deep dive into Volto#

To start Volto in development mode, we do yarn start. If you peek inside Volto's package.json at the script that's executed for that, you'll notice it simply says razzle start. So, when we start Volto, we actually start Razzle. See the Razzle chapter for more details.

Running in development mode provides automatic reload of changed code (hot reloading) and better debugging (unminified source code maps, etc).

Razzle provides two entrypoints for webpack: the server and the client bundles.

Volto HTTP server#

The server uses Expressjs uses renderToString from react-dom/server to provide server-side rendering of the HTML pages. From these generated HTML pages, the client bundle will be loaded by the browsers.

The HTTP server is extensible via Express middleware and Volto provides an API to declare and load them from Volto Projects and Addons.

Volto as Single Page Application#

Once the browser loads the client bundle, Volto mounts a location-based React Router and uses the App component as the top level component, plus other defined child routes. The View render component will be found and instantiated. Check the src/routes.js module to see all available routes. Notice that the generic View component is close to the last in the list of default routes, this allows routes to take precedence over the content matching.

On a content page view, the View component is rendered by App's router matching. Once the View component is mounted, it triggers a network call to fetch the JSON representation of the current context content. Based on the response content, it will lookup for a view component that matches the content (so, for example, news items can have their own custom views, etc).

The DefaultView, which is used when there's no custom content-type based view component found, is also "blocks-enabled". It will lookup two keys in the content, the blocks and blocks_layout. See the Volto Blocks chapter for more details.

The main View component has a "route detector" that will trigger the getContent action whenever the route (window location) changes, so new content will be fetched and a new view is rendered acordingly.