[Zope-PTK] Thoughts on a ZClass Squishdot

[Kevin Dangoor]

Hi,

    I should've written a note about this earlier (maybe I did, and I'm just
going senile), but the recent note about using ZDiscussions for a new
Squishdot jogged my memory.

    For byproducts, we didn't need the discussion functionality of
Squishdot, so I wrote KM|Net News. For another site that we might get to one
of these days, we will want the discussion functionality. I had thought on
this a bit before, and I realized that the functionality I wanted could be
achieved via a simple extension to KM|Net News.

    The idea is: rather than have a product that is *based* on ZDiscussions,
why not stick with the generic News Items and add the ability to attach
ZDiscussions to those News Items?

    Not to get too far off track, but one of the things that I like (and
frequently use) with KM|Net News is the scoring system. It's very simple,
but it allows me to easily decide the ordering of the articles. This is
useful on byproducts, because I usually don't want site news to be the top
headline (the top headline should always be something silly). So, if the
ordering was strictly chronological, I couldn't control this. I bring this
up now, because I don't think it is necessary to hack this kind of
functionality into ZDiscussions.

    I was thinking that News Items can have three different settings for the
type of discussion that is used:

* No discussion

* A discussion that is created for this message (ala Squishdot)

* A discussions that is based on the message category. This might make sense
for special purpose or slower traffic sites. If the site Manager does not
expect to get a whole lot of discussion on any given message, they can just
have discussions based on the categories of stories. For example, a space
site could have discussions on Hubble, Mars, the Moon, etc. Any news item
about Hubble would include the Hubble discussion (in Squishdot style)

    Thoughts on this? There may be some flaw that I'm missing here, because
I haven't actually tried this...

Kevin