Darcy Clark wrote:

...

I'd like to integrate some CMF-type features into the standard ZMI (Zope Management Interface). I want to do this for 2 reasons :

1. I'm lazy - the ZMI takes care of a lot of basic infrastructure, I don't want to code interfaces for everything 2. I like the ZMI interface

Basically the CMF feature that I want most is Workflow. I downloaded DCWorkflow and a patch to make it work outside of a CMF site, so now my plan is to create some content types based on CMFCore:PortalContent and add some additional tabs and buttons to the ZMI to handle the Workflow features.

So I have two questions to those with more Zen than I :

1. Can this work ?

Potentially, yes. One issue will be that you will have to have much of the CMF in place anyway, becase it is "infrastructure" rather than UI. For instance, the association between workflows and content types is stored in the workflow tool; other type- specific policies (discussability, actions, etc.) are stored in the types tool.

It is possible now to interact with CMF content via the ZMI, although that has not been our main focus. What you will miss out on is the "basic infrastructure" provided by the CMF's UI: action lists (somewhat analogous to the 'manage_options' tabs) which are workflow aware; "work lists" (user actions conditioned by content being in certain workflow states), and skinnability.

Thanks for the reply. I guess the next step is to work out how to reproduce the workflow elements of the CMF UI in a ZMI-based UI. I imagine that clues on how this would be done could be found in the "actions_box" method in the CMF Demo site. Is there any other code in the CMF Demo site that might be useful ? cheers, Darcy

Tres. -- =============================================================== Tres Seaver tseaver@zope.com Zope Corporation "Zope Dealers" http://www.zope.com