This probably isn't a new idea but:
How about having the ability to define in the Zope UI certain protocols (or Roles+Protocols) as "editing" protocols instead of "publishing" protocols, like WebDAV and FTP for example. When objects are accessed via those protocols, instead of seeing a single object, you see all it's properties, meta type, etc as sub-objects which you can edit individually.
This is still a harder problem than it appears on the surface. For example, it is not possible to tell for sure during a GET whether the client is a DAV client or not - this is a lamosity that I hope to get the time to address with the IETF WebDAV group at some point. FTP is a little more clear-cut, but there are still problems with trying to graft capabilities like property management onto a protocol that was never designed to support it. Perhaps you could see properties as a "subobject" of a DTMLDocument for example, and if you accessed the properties via FTP maybe you would get some sort of xml representation of them which you could edit and save to update the properties. But what does that mean for FTP clients? Everything will look like a directory, and things begin to behave less like you would expect if you don't know much about what's going on. One of the goals of FTP/DAV integration is to allow a greater range of users to interact with Zope in a way that fits their tool prefs and level of knowledge -- for example, WYSIWYG tools like Dreamweaver, etc. could use FTP behind the scenes and act as a non-threatening front end to Zope for less experienced users. I suspect that such tools would not behave quite in the expected way if all documents suddenly looked like containers :( Making FTP more useful is certainly a Good Thing, but exactly how we do that will require some careful consideration - especially in terms of hijacking the protocol to do Zope-specific things, since invalidating the expectations of clients would foil much of what we'd hoped to achieve with FTP integration. Just my $0.02... Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com