[Zope-CMF] Using CMF without portal like features

[Brad Clements]

On 31 Jul 2001, at 1:20, Lynn Walton wrote:

> I'm still entertaining the idea of trying to find someone with enough
> experience to give me GOOD guidance on using CMF with ZPT in a non-portal
> like site for starters, to do some consulting (just telephone ... not in
> person) to help answer enough questions to get us rolling.  Anyone who has
> the experience and time and interest in doing this kind of consulting,
> please send me your name, rates, and *brief* idea of experience pertaining
> to CMF/ZPT.

I'm a consultant using Zope and CMF and I need to do what you want to do.

I'm not looking for a consulting job from this, got too much to do!

Anyway, here's the approach I'm taking.

1. Objective : allow 1000+ wood product manufacturers to maintain public information 
about their companies, their products and pictures of their products.

2. Allow anonymous users to browse/search for products or companies that work with 
specific wood types (mahogany, for example), search criteria will also include "show me 
within x miles of this zipcode), etc.

3. "Shrink-wrap" the site onto a CD for distribution to Windows clients.. (down the road)

I did the http://www.AdirondackCraft.com website in Zope on RH Linux with Interbase. 
Product images are stored in the Zope site, and product inventory information is stored 
in Interbase. 

To meet goal #3, I chose to put everything into Zope by creating new portal types 
derived from ZClasses (had started this site using ZClasses, just rebased them to use 
CMF types instead).

So now we have Company, Product and ProductImage. ProductImage includes 
automatic thumbnails by using PIL and attaching the thumbnail data as a string property 
associated with the ProductImage instance. Is that a hack?

I created the CMF folder as a sub-folder of the main site. Manufacturers will go directly 
to the CMF to manage their products. The root site folder (above CMF) will use CMF 
Topics to do the searching, but display the results either using ZPT methods that are 
instances of the Zclasses, or new ZPT methods stored in the root folder.

This way I'm hoping that "typical public users" won't have any idea how the underlying 
stuff is stored or managed, yet the CMF interface will still be used by maintainers.. Will 
know later today if this works, as I'm planning to populate the site with 700 
manufacturers..

Site Layout:

/Root
     /AdkWood       (this is where Apache will proxy to)
               /CMF
                       /Members
                                /CompanyA
                                          /CompanyInfo (CMF Content/ZClass Instance)
                                                         /ProductA    (CMF Content/ZClass)
                                                                 /ImageA
                                                                 /ImageB
                                                         /ProductB
                                                                 /ImageA
                                /CompanyB
                                          /CompanyInfo (CMF Content/ZClass Instance)
                                                         /ProductA    (CMF Content/ZClass)
                                                                 /ImageA
                                                                 /ImageB
 



Brad Clements,                bkc@murkworks.com   (315)268-1000
http://www.murkworks.com                          (315)268-9812 Fax
netmeeting: ils://ils.murkworks.com               AOL-IM: BKClements