[Zope-PTK] several portal design issues

[Dmitry Kovalev]

Hello!

I'm thinking out a kind of portal to technological information (or maybe
a knowledge base also - I'm not quite clear about the terminology, after
all ;), which would be suitable for my employer's internal usage, as
well as open use.

As I understand, this is what PTK designed for (and Zope overall is
well-suited for), and I like the schema with private areas -> review
requests -> public catalog, but there are several key features that
I desire, and so far could not find among PTK resources...

I would be very grateful if somebody could comment the following from
the position of Zope/PTK/whatever_other_Zope_facility development,
because I'm quite new to the platform...

1) I'd like to have public catalog organized in hierarchy, something
like Yahoo (or the Yihaw product for Zope), and thus, to have a way to
move/copy/link the resource being published from member's folder to one
of the categories

2) It would be fine if members could organize their resources in their
"local" hierarchy, just like the public catalog

3) There should be a division of pending resources (maybe a member can
select desired categories for the resource, so that it can be reviewed
by corresponding reviewers assigned for those categories). Otherwise
there going to be overflooding of one single reviewer, or conflicts
between different reviewers on the same resource...

4) It would be excellent to have a special method/class/whatever "link",
that would display the resource it is pointed to in its place (just like
soft link in most filesystems)

5) Furthermore, it would be even better to have constant URIs regardless
of category and other site-wide "movements" of a resource. It would make
reorganization of hierarchy almost harmless (URIs in bookmarks and
search facility become independent of these reorganizations)

6) It is very important to have multilanguage capabilities. Ideally,
several major content contributors try to maintain their resources in
several languages, in my case - Russian + English. It should not be very
difficult for resources such as annotated links, and (slightly ;) more
difficult for articles and things ;) Then, a visitor/member chooses the
language he prefers, and gets it, but (!!!) if there is no version of
the resource in this language, the only available version is shown.
Language selection could also have influence on the interface.

7) I'd like to have more resource types (and to have more attributes in
them) than in sample portal. These would be like:
 - category + annotation, keywords etc
 - local article + annotation, keywords, bundled links
 - annotated link (to an article, to a site - maybe different types with
different set of attrs) + broken link report facility
 - local copy of most important resources + original location
 - product description + annotation, price, download urls, doc urls etc
 - glossary item - short article about a term with links to related
resources
 - FAQs & HOWTOs (maybe just as plain articles separate category)
 ... and possibly more (it would be fine to have ability to add new
resource types while in production, or add new attributes/behaviour)

8) It would be great to have ability to index foreign-formatted
documents in Catalog (like PDF etc). Or integrate Catalog search with
things like Harvest, if former is not possible.


Uugh. Not that I want it all at once ;), but much of these is pretty
important, and anyway, I would be gratefull for any
comments/suggestions/links to products/zclasses.

I have pretty clear abstract object model of the software, but
implementing it all from scratch is a considerable amount of work, and
me (and my employer also) would want to see it working in this life ;)
I got across Zope and PTK, and it seems to me that it should work, but
I'm quite new to Zope and python, so - please help ;)

Thanks in advance,

WBW, Dmitry