[Zope-CMF] Can the CMF work for me?

[Timothy Wilson]

Hi everyone,

I've been trying to wrap my brain about something for a while now and I
thought that someone here might be able to offer some insight. I've been
subscribed to zope-cmf for a long time, but I admit that I haven't followed
every thread.

I'm a full-time science teacher and very part-time Web developer for my
school district. I hope to be more successful recruiting helpers next year,
but up 'til now it's been essentially a one-man show. There's no way that I
could have managed the content that's on our site without Zope.

I've got big plans for the site including daily announcements, an event
calendar, news stories, school lunch menus, etc. I also think membership
will be important. The news, events, and membership map quite naturally to
the CMF of course.

What I don't comprehend is how the obvious CMF-related content can be merged
with content that isn't so obviously portal-like. For example, we've got a
simple online job board that I coded for our HR
dept. (http://www.isd197.org/hr/jobs/) It has worked very well for us. I
also built a little "Picture of the Day" feature on our high school's page
(http://www.isd197.org/sibley/) that was very popular. We'd like to
experiment with things like the Exam Product
(http://www.zope.org/Members/J.A.R.Williams/exam) for online testing.

So the question is how easily the CMF content can be integrated with
nonportal content in a single site. My impression has been that the CMF is
sort of an all-or-nothing solution. If I have to make all my content
compatible with the CMF, I'm not sure it's worth it. On the other hand, I
really don't want to have to implement my own workflow... Oh, the
agony! Can you sense that I'm a bit conflicted. :-)

I'm looking forward to any comments that anyone can offer.

-Tim

--
Tim Wilson      |   Visit Sibley online:   | Check out:
Henry Sibley HS |  http://www.isd197.org   | http://www.zope.org
W. St. Paul, MN |                          | http://slashdot.org
wilson@visi.com |  <dtml-var pithy_quote>  | http://linux.com