[Zope-PTK] ZTopic scenario

[Mike Pelletier]

  Hello, Timothy.

  You could use ZTopics to provide each school with customized views
of content.  However, that won't prevent them from seeing the other
school's topics.  It wont look like a different portal to each school,
it'll just offer known locations for each school to look for stuff.

  I see two options open to you.  The best and easiest would be to
read and participate in the (overly frighteningly named) ReviewRevamp
Wiki:

	http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/ZWiki/ReviewRevamp

  Perhaps you don't want to manage a role for each school.  (There's
no easy way to manage roles on members yet anyway.)  In that case,
your best bet would be to extend the PortalCatalog to filter results
based on the user's school  Here's how I'd do it.

  o Add a property to the Member object which associates each Member
    with a particular school or schools.  This should be a string or a
    sequence of strings.

  o Add a property to your content which describes which schools the
    content is relevant for.  This should be a sequence of strings.

  o Provide an interface to edit this, and make it available via
    toolbox_actions.

  o Add a KeywordIndex to the catalog.  This should index the schools
    property of your content objects.

  o Extend the PortalCatalog searchResults method to insert a new key.
    This is essentially all PortalCatalog does, so you can use it as a
    straightforward model.

  o Replace your portal's catalog with the new extended one.

  I wonder if PortalCatalog shouldn't allow you to to customize the
filters it applies without having to extend the class.  I'll probably
do this... eventually.

Good luck,
Mike.

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Timothy Wilson wrote:

> Hey everyone,
> 
> Here's how I'm envisioning Topics working on my site. Please let me know if
> I'm way off base here.
> 
> As I've described previously, the site I'm working on is for the school
> district where I teach. Like nearly all school districts we are a collection
> of individual buildings, departments, and classrooms.
> 
> My goal is to create one central Web site for the entire school district
> that would be the place that first-time visitors and unauthenticated
> members see. Once a user authenticates or joins the site, they could
> customize the site for their particular needs. What's the single most
> important way of organizing? By school, of course. I want the site to be
> instantly filtered for a particular school when a student of staff member
> from that school logs in. That's the key to the whole thing as far as I'm
> concerned.
> 
> No more individual sites for each school. (It just looks like
> it.) Information of interest to the entire district can be added to the site
> once and be made visible on all of the filtered school pages. I imagine
> having a topic for each building, department and classroom which would
> greatly facilitate the customized presentation of the site's content on a
> per-user basis.
> 
> Am I in the ballpark here? (What's with the baseball metaphors?? :-) I don't
> really want to step up to the plate and strike out on this. (Couldn't
> resist.)
> 
> -Tim
> 
> --
> Tim Wilson      | Visit Sibley online:         | Check out:
> Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.k12.mn.us/ | http://www.zope.org/
> W. St. Paul, MN |                              | http://slashdot.org/
> wilson@visi.com |   <dtml-var pithy_quote>     | http://linux.com/

-- 
Mike Pelletier                          email: mike@digicool.com
Mild mannered software developer          icq: 7127228
by day, super villain by night.         phone: 519-884-2434