Hi, --- Cees de Groot <cg@cdegroot.com> wrote:
I was off this list for the last half year or so, so I'm in for some catching up :-).
I think a lot has been happening in that time :) [deletia]
Q1: is Zope the best environment to do this on? On the collaboration part, Zope's user features are great, and Confera is ok as well, but other things are lacking (chat, public file repositories, interfaces to CVS maybe, talkback areas at the bottom of most pages, etcetera).
I think Zope offers many, many useful things for collaboration. The Zope Portal Toolkit fills in some gaps to make it a fabulous tool. In general, I think the ZClasses and Catalog features (both in alpha) make "rolling your own" very easy. And, you can reuse the components you create very easily. Specifically: chat: there are lots of chat solutions out there. I'm not sure if a Zope-based chat system would offer much value. file repositories: check in the Zope email archives (available on egroups or in the community section of the Zope site) for a message from Paul Everitt just a couple of days ago. He wrote about the things that DC is planning to do in this area. I think a file repository is the type of thing that ZClasses and Catalog make easy to create a custom version that does just what you want. CVS interfaces: depending on your needs, you may be able to whip this up with some External Methods... talkback at the bottom of the page: One way you can do this is by having something in your standard_html_footer template with a link to a Confera topic... My feeling, in general, is that there may be a slew of applications that are not pre-built with Zope. *But*, they're pretty easy to build in Zope today and will be even easy with ZClasses and Catalog once those are in their final form. [wiki stuff deleted... I don't know anything about this.]
Q3: if the answer on Q1 is "yes", are there any Zope gurus out there who want to help me on structuring the site, maybe writing some of the utilities that are missing? One of the reasons for picking Zope is that I'm considering making the add-ons for collaboration available as part of the project, so that schools can run Zope (Zope fits the OSES requirements for platform independence, that's a very big benefit).
I think there will an increase in contributed Zope Products once everyone has deployed Zope2. And anything you (and others) build for your project will be really easy to package up and distribute to any schools that want to use it.
Q4: (this should be an easy one - maybe I've missed a FAQ somewhere?) What's the easiest way to have "last modified ... by ..." on the bottom of each page?
I think <!--#var bobobase_modification_time--> will get you the time of modification. I don't know about the 'who' modified part... Kevin _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com