Related contents: keeping compatibility with Plone 3

Some days before the Christmas break we found a little compatibility problem with collective.portletpage: when used on Plone 4, and a user add a related item to a Portlet Page content, the "Related content" area were doubled, shown twice.
One in the Plone 3 style (a ul/li structure inside a fieldset element) and another in the new Plone 4 style (that now is a dl/dt+dd code).

The problem? Starting with Plone 4, the related content section has been removed from content view of default content types and has been registered as a viewlet.
This change is great if speaking of design of Web pages. Now a user can move the viewlet in the content view.
Before this (in Plone 3) the related contents area was always at the bottom of the content's view template, called explicitly as a macro... that still exists in Plone 4.

Technically speaking, the new Plone 4 viewlet is registered for every content type, but still the Plone 3.3 related contents macro exists, and contains the same old code (by the way... I think that keeping it as an empty macro could be a better choice).
So: the problem I'm describing is probably quite frequent. It strikes every content type product updated to Plone 4 but were the view has not been updated recently. I meditate about this problem two minutes and I found other two products we own that right now suffer the same problems: Smart Link and RedTurtle Video. We already planned to fix them sooner.

Quick fix
If you don't need anymore to keep Plone 3 compatibility, simply remove the old call to the macro from your content's view. So: take a loot to your content types now!

Less quick (but fair) fix
What if you want to keep Plone 4 compatibility? Removing the macro call make your product no more perfectly working on Plone 3.3: explicit related contents area will be removed from the Plone version where the related item viewlet is not present.

For  Plone newcomers this can seem a waste of time, but for us isn't. Even if Plone 4 is quickly growing, we still have a lot of old Plone 3 customers that ask for new features. I personally don't like too much the "branch way" of keeping compatiblity (continue releasing an "old family" product and a "new generation" ones).

So you can find many workaround for this, but the new Plone 4 feature (a viewlet for related items) in my opinion is also a great enhancement.
For this reason I take some time to develop a very simple product: collective.relateditems.
With this you simply need to update your content view to Plone 4, then add this product to your buildout when you are in a Plone 3 environment (see the documentation to know how to make this dependency automatically fulfilled).

The product simply register a related items viewlet exactly how is done for Plone 4, but keeping Plone 3.3 CSS styles.
What this product also does is to register this viewlet only for content's that implements a new provided interface. So you are the one who choose if display related items viewlet or not (thanks to ZCA, there is a very simple way to make Python classes implementing an interface even without touching 3rd party code).

Conclusion
I have no real conclusion, just a suggestion: go and try your old product, adding to it at least one related item!