Message: 47 Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 21:00:08 -0800 (PST) From: Maneesh Yadav <yadavm@scripps.edu> Reply-To: Maneesh Yadav <yadavm@scripps.edu> To: zope@zope.org Subject: [Zope] newbie... Disclaimer: I think it took me a year to realize what Zope actually is....maybe I still don't know :) Sorry to bother you all, but the Zope environment is so rich with options I'm not sure which path I should take. I am doing a web page for my lab and I have Zope up and running fine and I think I understand most of the basics....now I need to make a web page that I'd like to do a couple of things, keep a little profile of each person in the lab, have a little web interface for POs (just a form with some fields that writes stuff to a database so everyone can see what items have been ordered) and an overview of research. It's not really dynamic content, but I'd like to use Zope for the ordering system and to ease design. I was going to make a bunch of METAL macros but I *think* it'd be smarter to store things like personell profile in a database and have a web page that just prints out the contents and the same kinda thing for lab POs (purchase orders)... Would someone mind giving me a general layout for connectivity between everything? I know Zope has ZopeDB but it is unclear to me as to how to actually make data entries and define a database...or do I have to make my database in postgresql and connect to the database over zope? So I know I should use metal for general site layout (nav bars and the like), but how can I arrange my two underlying databases and what do I use in Zope to connect to them and present the results of the SQL queries? Would it be easy to have a tree like nav bar on the side (like Zope?), what component does the 'tree' code fit under? No need to xplain in too much detail, jbasically just what tool I need to do what and I am sure I can follow one of the tutorials... Many Thanks, Maneesh Hi Maneesh, its good that you have decided to use Zope. Actually its not very clear to me what are your requirements. But as far as creating profiles of people are concern, i think its easily possible with Zope. 1.Maybe you can start with a form with name and other details of your lab members. 2. A small python script will create new entries everytime you feed in the data and create the id's of the entry to number of the employee...or something which will be unique to that employee. 3.This entry (object) will have other details(profile) of the employee as its properties. 4.You can use the unique id you create to look for that particular employee from your webpage. I hope this is what you want to do. Sanket.