[ZDP] Some remarks about the portal design(s)

[Chris Withers]

> [rh]Yes, but Chris WIthers has been plugging the searchable mailing list
> archives at his site (can't find a link now, sorry)

Sorry, I got the original hint, I've just been too busy to even drop a
mail. But it's 9pm and I'm still at work, so I might as well ;-)

Basically, we started archiving some Zope related lists in December last
year 'cos the archives at Zope.org aren't searchable and eGroups sucks
to high heaven.

Our archives worked for us (not to mention the fact that they're local
;-) so we spent about a week making them accessible through the web in a
'nice' way (up until that point it had been quick'n'dirty web interface
or the Notes Client...) and then announced it to the Zope community. We
now get about 14,000 hits a month which at least means it was worth
while :-)

So, to bring this to a point, we now have archives of the Zope,
Zope-Dev, Zope-PTK and ZCommerce mailing lists at the following address:

http://zope.nipltd.com/public/lists.html

And I mention them wherever I can ;-)
If you want any more lists archived, just let me know...

Plans for the future:
1. start analysing what people are searching for to highlight document
deficiencies (and yes I want to feed this back to ZDP! ;-)
2. move the archives to a Zope based solution. This is really low
priority though. It's a pain to make changes to them, but they do work
on the whole. They're based on proven high-volume archiving and
searching technology (Lotus Notes) and, although it would be fun to try,
I haven't got the time or confidence to move it all into a ZODB and use
a ZCatalog. Hopefully someone at DC is going to send me some copies of
the CDs which were done with the list archives on them and then maybe
I'll see...

Hope this all helps,

Chris