[Zope-PTK] Search engine woes solved, sorta

[Nolan Darilek]

So I've been pulling out hair, making sacrifices to the gods, and
generally making an annoyance out of myself as I struggled to figure
out why my PTK search engine wasn't working, and I've finally figured
it out, I think? But this leaves me with more questions than answers.

It seems that Document, NewsItem, Link, etc. are the only items which
show up by default on my PTK site. This is helpful in one sense, since
I'm trying to allow for advertising, but I'd still like to support
moderation to ensure that the advertising is appropriate to my
site. However, my circumstances are a bit unusual, and I'd like to see
if there is some other way to solve my problem.

As previously stated, this site is for a student organization, a sort
of "student government." Instead of concerning ourselves with the
entire campus however, we're only concerned with one residence
hall. The officers in this organization change yearly, and many
residents arrive and leave regularly. So, our community is fairly
dynamic.

I'm using the PTK to empower residents and officers to contribute more
freely in areas which they haven't been able to in the past. Residents
can apply for accounts and write articles for our newsletter,
advertise for any events which they are coordinating, etc. The PTK
works well for this, but it seems to be designed for a more static
community.

I like the fact that the PTK Z Catalog only indexes specific items,
since that reduces the likelihood for abuse. However, is it somehow
possible to index content in specific "trusted" folders, without
requiring publication/approval first? As an example, I wrote a
document which explains how to use the Event wizard and the Ad Banner
Wizard which I'm writing to advertise. I originally wrote it as a DTML
method and placed it within a help folder. The URL to the document was
originally mysite.org/help/advertising. Transferring this text to a
Document and placing it in my personal folder changes the URL to the
much more forgetable mysite.org/Members/myusername/advertising. Once I
used a Document for storing the text though, the search engine finds
it nicely. Similarly, we will be publishing a newsletter using Zope as
a means for colaboration and, thanks to ZPDFDocument, a quick way to
spit out a printer-friendly version of our work. I would very much
like to store issues as mysite.org/newsletter/apr00/ instead of
storing each article in several documents in a user folder. This also
allows us to delete the user's account after they are gone, without
fearing that they may have written articles which will be lost.

So, is there an easy way to automatically index certain folders on the
site without a) indexing everything and b) sacrificing the
publishing/moderation facilities which the PTK currently offers?