Dennis Allison wrote:

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which allows my users to create a discussion thread. I'd thought that I could simply simulate the ZMI mechanisms in Python or DTML, This fails both when accessed expicitly and when accessed using the through-the-web interface. I suspect protections but have not found the right ones to toggle.

You've yet to actually tell us how it fails, provide your code or any error messages. How are we supposed to help you find out what's going on? ;-)

Sorry, I thought I'd done that and posted some version of what fails. Dieter Mauer pointed out that the dispatcher was keyed with "ZDiscssions" and that appears to work--at least it returns a dispatcher object. So, to construct a ZDiscussions object in container, I would have thought I should write container.manage_addProduct['ZDiscussions'].manage_addZDTopic( id, title=... ) and so forth. manage_addZDTopic is defined in ZDBase, the base class for the ZDiscussions ZClass (which creates ZDTopic and ZDItems...). There's a bit more to making it work, but the first step is to get a program creating an instance...