Re: Content Management Design Patterns
Hi Eron, Sorry this went unanswered for so long. Just reading the lists is enough to keep me hopping lately. When I asked Steve if he had replied to you, we discovered that there had never even been a post about our book on zope-announce! Check there for an _even_more_generalized_ blurb. On 12/21/2001 Eron wrote:
Does anyone have a recommendation for "best practices" for implementing complicated Web patterns like Session Tracking, Member Profile management (how to store the back-end data), Multi-cookie storage/retrieval, and "shopping cart" paradigms? I know that Zope (and specifically CMF) provides for these applications, but I'd like a resource on the core concepts & principles. I'm aware that New Riders is publishing another Zope book entitled "Zope: Web Application Development and Content Management", and could this be exactly what I'm looking for? Steve Spicklemire, would you mind whetting our appetites?
Well, the term "best practices" does show up in the book here and there... Specifically, several of those topics are covered in advanced chapters (section III), with a bias toward ZPatterns based solutions. As the Zope 3 "Components" model rolls out the ease of integrating Zope modules, and related data, that were developed independently will likely improve. At the time when our book was written, the use of techniques such as ZPatterns seemed a most effective option. There is a detailed example of merging a membership list with an E-Commrce tool (Steve's emarket) in chapters 11, 12, and on integrating user authentication in chapter 13. Regardless, time spent grokking just about any useful Zope/Python technologies will yield a better understanding of the problem domains, and how to render objectish solutions. Thanks for the interest! Jerry S. (for Steve, Kevin & Kim too . . . )
At the time when our book was written, the use of techniques such as ZPatterns seemed a most effective option. There is a detailed example of merging a membership list with an E-Commrce tool (Steve's emarket) in chapters 11, 12, and on integrating user authentication in chapter 13.
Hi Jerry, Perhaps it would be useful to indicate on the companion website webdev.zopeonarope.com what no longer works under 2.5, and which parts that have been emphasized in the book are no longer relevant. I've been trying to follow Chapter 12, but find that emarket is a broken product, and apparently from what you say above, zpatterns is to be superceded soon. -- Graham Chiu
Hi Graham, On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, you wrote:
Perhaps it would be useful to indicate on the companion website webdev.zopeonarope.com what no longer works under 2.5
Even better, we hope to be posting updates, fixes, or workarounds for anything that stops working with newer versions of Zope, or for whatever reason. In fact, this process has already begun. See the chapter two folder on the web site, for example.
and which parts that have been emphasized in the book are no longer relevant.
Relevance is a pretty subjective quality, and has everything to do with the tools that an individual selects. If a tool still works and is performing some useful task for someone, that seems quite relevant, especiallly to that person.
I've been trying to follow Chapter 12, but find that emarket is a broken product, and apparently from what you say above, zpatterns is to be superceded soon.
Thanks to your feedback, Steve will be looking at emarket right away. More details of the problems you've encountered would greatly aid that effort. ZPatterns has been called "obsolete", "a retired package", and probably things even less inspiring. On the other hand, the term I find most useful to describe a package that has reached such a stage in its life cycle is "stable". Just because ZPatterns isn't the hottest agenda item of the originators anymore, doesn't mean that it has ceased to provide benefit to those who have climbed the learning curve and implemented production systems. Lots of folks are still running Linux 2.2, even though there are some nice features available in the 2.4 kernel. However, there are also some showstoppers hiding in 2.4, for certain users, and 2.4 is still pretty darn good for most purposes. I sincerely hope that the Zope 3 components model catches on, and makes life easier for many Zope developers, but experience leads me to suspect that things will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. There is probably no way around this continual churn, and after all the ultimate goal is an ever improving Zope. Still, it can be frustrating for the garden variety Zope fan who really just needs to get things working, and to be able to count on them to remain in that state. If Zope 3 is the ticket, super. If ZPatterns gets you there, who can ask for more than that? Sometimes the latest thing != the greatest thing, in terms of net productivity.
-- Graham Chiu
Thanks for your interest, Jerry S.
Hi Graham, On Saturday, February 16, 2002, at 07:59 PM, jerry wrote:
Hi Graham,
On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, you wrote:
Perhaps it would be useful to indicate on the companion website webdev.zopeonarope.com what no longer works under 2.5
Even better, we hope to be posting updates, fixes, or workarounds for anything that stops working with newer versions of Zope, or for whatever reason. In fact, this process has already begun. See the chapter two folder on the web site, for example.
and which parts that have been emphasized in the book are no longer relevant.
Relevance is a pretty subjective quality, and has everything to do with the tools that an individual selects. If a tool still works and is performing some useful task for someone, that seems quite relevant, especiallly to that person.
I've been trying to follow Chapter 12, but find that emarket is a broken product, and apparently from what you say above, zpatterns is to be superceded soon.
For what it's worth, there is (now) a version of EMarket that should work in Zope-2.5.0 on webdev.zopeonarope.com. EMarket wasn't really meant to be "part of the book", but it was mentioned in chapter 12 as an example of a ZPatterns based product. ZPatterns itself won't really be "superceded" until Zope3 is final. We are already helping out on Zope3.. so we'll be moving our products there as well. While we might not be using ZPatterns, we'll be doing all the same things, so we'll need ZPatterns-like functionality. Thanks for the note, and the incentive to post the update. take care, -steve
participants (3)
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Graham Chiu -
jerry -
Steve Spicklemire