-----Original Message----- From: Harry [mailto:mail-zope@fizbin.com] Sent: Monday, November 29, 1999 2:29 PM To: zope Subject: [Zope] Squishdot, Confera, ZDConfera and ZDiscussions....

I'm currently in the rather thankless process of trying to convert Squishdot to use the ZDConfera product, instead of the old Confera product that it is based on. It was recommended that I heavily use ZClasses to that end.

I would recommend developing the base classes in python and subclassing them with ZClasses that define the interfaces to the python objects. I've found that patern the most useful.

If anyone has dabbled in this, and has anything cool, or helpful to contribute, I'd be very appreciative, mostly because I know next to zero about Zope or python when I started this, and am effectively just trying to figure out the logic by comparing printouts of Squishdot.py, Confera.py and ZDConfera.py.

Something to think about a bit is cataloging and indexing. In fact, these issues of searchability and findability will probably be the deepest to think about and the easiest to over look. Currently, Confera uses the *old* indexing code that was behind a Product called ZTables (which is currently... hibernating...). ZTables was a bit like the Catalog, but different. Confera has some simple, hardwired field indexes and a hardwired text index. Also, these index types are simpler and less efficient then the ones Catalog are based on. The Catalog, which comes with Zope, means that Squisdot doesn't need to work nearly as hard as it does. ZDConfera is, (this is a guess) probably based on CatalogWareness, which means that it's articles and threads are indexed automaticly by the stock Catalog. You would probably need to take those protocols into consideration most. Let me give you a tip, it might be more flexible, in the long run, to not use CatalogAwareness, as it has some major drawbacks. Second, Squishdot is written in Python, and I think you should keep all of the indexing and cataloging aspects in python, it's easier to deal with at that level then the DTML level. Unfortunatly, the ZCatalog model I spend a lot of time on got toasted by the UML tool we use, so you'll have alot of code to read. Lastly, there is the yet to be released ZTopics which is a catalog like catagorical tool that lets you create Yahoo like heirarchies of 'topics' from a disperse set of objects. Objects can be assigned a keyword list of topics that get indexed inthe Catalog, and the ZTopic object does a 'canned query' to build the heirarchy dynamically. It would probably be a good idea to take that into consideration, ie, don't roll your own catagory system cuz there's one coming down the pipe in the future.

First, I'll be trying to replace all Confera parts in the Squishdot.py code, by calls to the Confera product. Then, on my second pass, I plan on (hopefully) being able to replace calls to Confera with calls to ZDConfera.

I haven't figured out how ZDiscussions fits into all of this, but I honestly won't concern myself with that right now.

I heard a rumor that ZDConfera adds backwards compatability to ZDiscussions to make it Confera like. -Michel