[Zope-PTK] ZTopic scenario

[Timothy Wilson]

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Mike Pelletier wrote:

>   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.

That's OK. I don't have any reason to prevent people from seeing content
from the other schools. It just happens that nearly all user contributed
content will exist in the context of a classroom, department, or school.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, using ZTopics will at the very least help with
the sorting and searching. For example, a student at Foo Elementary should
see the lunch menu for Foo Elementary and not Spam Elementary. I like the
idea of confining ZCatalog searches to a particular topic.

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

Eeek! <breaks out in a cold sweat> I'll check it out. :-)

>   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.

That information is already contained in our NDS directory. Getting it out
of NDS is a whole 'nother can of worms. (Please excuse the U.S.ism)

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

As far as user cutomization goes, my thinking was that each user should be
able to filter what types of content they'd like to see. A student at Foo
Elem. will see all of that news by default, but they might also like to see
sports news from the high school. A parent of students at Spam Elementary
and Bar High School might want to filter for those schools plus some other
set of news categories. I want every user to see district-wide news items
(with no option to exclude them).

Going further, student 'John Q. Doe' might be taking chemistry during a
particular hour with a particular teacher. I'm wondering if topics would be
a useful way to facilitate searching for information related to that
particular class. All of our student schedules and teaching assignments are
contained in an Oracle database that I hope to hook up to Zope so that Zope
can automatically determine who is enrolled in which classes. It will be
very cool if it works out.

I'll take a careful look at the rest of your suggestions. I hope this makes
some sense.

-Tim

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