[Zope-PTK] ZTopic scenario

[Mike Pelletier]

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Timothy Wilson wrote:

> 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.

  Think of ZTopics being to a ZCatalog what DMOZ or Yahoo is to the
Internet.  Actually, they're quite simple to install and use, you
should just take a look.

> 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.

  You can't search 'within' a topic, but I can see how you might
improve ZTopic to support this.  It wouldn't be difficult.

  I like your ideas about filters, below.  I can see how it would be
very useful for not only administrators, but individual members to be
able to apply global (to them) filters to the catalog.  It would be an
easy feature to hack into a portal, a bit harder to add to the PTK in
a friendly and consistent fashion.  But definately a desirable
feature!  I'll ponder on it for a while.

Mike.

> 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
> 
> --
> 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/
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Zope-PTK maillist  -  Zope-PTK@zope.org
> http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-ptk
> 
> See http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/Tracker for bug reports and feature requests
> 

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