Let's say you have a large catalog of photos and maps on your website. You can easily display them all at once by creating a hyperlink to the folder they're stored in. You could even create different links for subfolders if you've organized things that way. However, there is no way with normal folders to display different content, from different parts of your site based on things like:

• keywords in the title
• date of creation
• author
• type of content

The need for showing content in a variety of dynamic ways has given rise to Smart Folders, or folders that know a thing or two about your content. However, the very name Smart Folder is actually a little misleading because Smart Folders don't actually contain content. They do contain criteria, very similar to a search query, that controls exactly what you see in each Smart Folder.

Applications for Smart Folders are commonly:

• News Archives
• Event Archives
• Photos Displayed by Date Range
• Content Displayed by Keyword
  

Before I get into explaining how to create your own Smart Folder, go on to the next page to see how they work in practice.

To start understanding just what Smart Folders do, let's explore some existing ones that will search this site for:

• All glossary definitions in alphabetical order
• Anything with the word "internet" in the body text
• Recently created content and archive subfolder

Click on any of the above links to see a Smart Folder display its results. These will open in a new window, so you don't lose your place in this tutorial. When you're finished viewing these Smart Folders, go to the next page to learn how to craft your own!

To start with, I'm going to show you how to create a Smart Folder that will display all News Items found on your website. This is one of the most common Smart Folders found on a site, and you may in fact already have one on your site.

1. Find a place on your site to keep your Smart Folders.
2. Click on the Add to Folder tab and select Smart Folder from the list.
   • Notice that you're now working in the Edit tab for this content item. This screen is for naming the Smart Folder and choosing display options.
     
3. Give your Smart Folder a Title and Description.
   
4. You may now choose to Limit Search Results (optional)
   
   • Limiting results only limits the number of results per page, not the total number of results found
5. You may also choose to display results in a table. This is optional (the default display is a vertical list) so you can play around with this if you like.
6. Push Save to create the Smart Folder.

This completes the first part of building a Smart Folder. Go on to the next page to learn how to set the search parameters on your new Smart Folder.

At this point the Smart Folder exists, but it doesn't do anything because you have to give it some criteria to tell it what to do. As you might expect, click on the Criteria tab to finish your Smart Folder set up.

Notice that there are two boxes, so to speak. One is labeled Add New Search Criteria, and the other is labeled Set Sort Order. Ignore Set Sort Order for the moment.

Under Add New Search Criteria are two drop-down menus called Field Name and Criteria Type. Click on the Field Name menu to see all the choices. To create a News Smart Folder, choose Item Type.

You may notice that when you select Item Type, that there is only one choice for Criteria Type. That is because you must push Add to create the search criteria, then you can select the exact content type that your Smart Folder will search for. Other Field Names such as Creation Date will give you more than one Criteria Type to choose from. In the example on the right, you can choose a Creation Date range or relative date.

After pushing the Add button, the top of the Smart Folder screen should look like this:

To delete a criterion, use the check box in the first column and push Remove.

From the list under Value find News Item and select it. You may select several Content Types from this list by holding down the Control button when you click on content types. If you do select several Values from the list, you can join them using the Operator Name to search for News AND Files, or News OR Events. When your're finished with this, push Save.

You're now looking at three boxes on the screen. The top box is the criterion you we're just working on. The second box allows you to Add New Search Criteria. This is how you could, for example, search for News Items (criterion one) created before July 1st (criterion two). The third box is Set Sort Order if you wish to change the order the results display in.

Note: All the above only works if you actually have News Items on your Plone site. If you do not, try changing the Item Type to Page. That should show you some results.

So now that you've gotten familiar with creating Smart Folders, you might be wondering how to use them. The most obvious way for your site visitors to find a Smart Folder is to simply create a link to it from a page. Remember the examples you saw on page two? It just as easy as that.

You can also nest Smart Folders within Smart Folders. That will result in the message Contained Smart Folders and any subfolders listed there at the bottom of a Smart Folder view. You can access this functionality by using the Subfolders tab in the task bar of a Smart Folder. These are useful for things like a News Item Smart Folder that contains all News Items less than one month old, and a subfolder for News Items older than one month (in effect creating a news archive page). You can really create some sophisticated ways to organize information on your website using Smart Folders, multiple criteria, and subfolders.

If you need a refresher on the things you learned in this tutorial, or you're more of a visual learner, please see the these two videos: Creating a News Smart Folder and Creating and Using Smart Folders