Tim Wilson <wilson@chemsun.chem.umn.edu> writes:

Hi everyone,

I'm just about to install Zope for the first time and would like to begin developing portal/Slashdot-like for my school district's home page. I'm a science teacher in the district who's being paid this summer to work on the page.

Can we pay you to brainwash your students into thinking Zope is the future? ;)

I've been lurking on this list for a couple weeks now and reading as much as I can. Zope look awesome! I can't wait to start using it.

Before I get to that, I'm wondering if someone could briefly describe the difference between the Zope Portal Toolkit and the Squishdot product. It appears that the ZPT is an official Digital Creations product, while Squishdot is user-created. I know that ZPT requires 2.0.x (which I was going to install anyway). Do the two produts work together at all? I'm trying to figure out where to start.

The two products can work fine together, and, in fact, would compliment each other quite well. Squishdot is based on a much earlier and simpler Digital Creations product (now unsupported) called Confera. Butch Landening (I hope I spelled you last name right Butch) used confera as the basis for the very impressive Squishdot, which is a weblog. Confera is a discussion board product that was written in the pre-weblog days, and it happened to have a nice messaging core which Butch used for the message store in Squisdot. In addition, Butch prettied it up mightily and added many new and cool features. Squishdot can be thought of as an out of the box solution to a Zope based weblog. The Zope Portal Toolkit on the other hand, is, as its name implies, a collection of Zope products and Zope infrastructure components that allow content developers to easily develop sites which employ such features as Membership (the ability for users to contribute in a distributed way to an entire site's content) site wide searching, issue tracking in a sensible workflow environment, and other features. We anticipate Squishdot, with little modification, to be an important community contributed component of the Zope Portal Toolkit. As an example, you can use the ZPT's membership to allow your students to have their own 'home folder' where they can upload documents and files related to their projects. Site wide searching and cataloging will allow your students to search the whole site, and catagoricaly break down the various artifacts of their home folders. Squishdot will allow your students to originate and follow up on threads of discussion among the whole 'community'. Issue tracking will allow you to originate 'issues' which can then be tracked from actor to actor (think of peer review on an assignment), with the actors typicly being members, or just email addresses for 'foreign' participants. -Michel

Later, Tim

-- Timothy D. Wilson "A little song, a little dance, University of MN, chem. dept. a little seltzer down your wilson@chem.umn.edu pants." -Chuckles the Clown Phone: (612) 625-9828 as eulogized by Ted Baxter

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