Gabe wrote:
I wanted to ask the list what people's thoughts were on the appropriateness of implementing a Slashdot-like site in Zope.
Your email this weekend finally prompted me to make the decision on Tabula and to announce our intentions on doing a Zope-Slashdot. Here are my plans with this regard: 1) Create a mailing list for "Zopespot", the name of the community project that coordinates this. 2) When Ken gets here, make him the shepherd for the project. 3) Publish my stab at the requirements document. 4) Turn the zope.org site into a legitimate contender for best portal/community site on the Internet. We intend to invest pretty heavily in making the Zopespot software and the content on zope.org a shining example. 5) Work with others (lwn.net, python.org, etc.) to offer it.
I have looked at the Slashdot source code (in perl) and its pretty messy (to put it mildy). I hacked at it to get it to work with the free Sybase server on linux and it works reasonably well, but I haven't gone much beyond that.
If a slashdot-like site were implemented on Zope, would an external SQL database be neccesary, or would the internal object database be enough? For searching?
With the Tabula software available for the Zopespot project, I think you'll be pretty impressed. I loaded a 23 Mb portion of the Internet movie database into a Tabula on my P166 laptop with 64 Mb running NT. Search times for a combination fielded/full-text search came back in under a second. Tabula, which is under the tutelage of Jeffrey Shell here, is a serious piece of gear. Briefly, I see Zopespot as filling the following goals: o Well-organized site with discoverable, timely information. o Harness the energy of contributors. o Apply editorial control. o Provide added value for members. o Demonstration of software potential. o Lower our admin burden while raising scalability. o Integrate many kinds of resources. o Adhere to applicable emerging standards. Zopespot could manag the following kinds of Items: Packages, Documents, News, Projects, BugReports, FeatureRequests, Members, Discussions, CaseStudies, BuzzReports, JobListings, Polls, Ads, etc. Each Item will support and expanded Zope Framework protocol for managed content: id, title, category, keywords, last_update, owner, meta_type, isVisible, summary Users will have a variety of ways to browse and search content.
Building the Slashdot-style site on Zope has the attractive feature of being very customizable and modular from the get-go (something which Slashdot source code is trying to get to). Slashdot (the site) gets a LOT of traffic -- would a zope server be able to handle the (what I'm guessing is) hundreds of thousands of hits per day? Do we have to wait
The current Zope software with Tabula outta beat that pretty easily on a reasonable hardware. Zope2 will make it easier to add more juice to the object system.
until the Medusa integration is complete (not that throwing together a slashdot clone can be done before digicool folks can get that done).
I'm a BIG fan of organizing the requirements before marching off on such an ambitious project. --Paul Paul Everitt Digital Creations paul@digicool.com 540.371.6909