[Zope-CMF] Hard time grokking Zope-CMF

[seb bacon]

* Bryan Field-Elliot <bryan_lists@netmeme.org> [011010 06:19]:
> For example -- who exactly is doing most of the content creation in Zope
> CMF -- is it site operators, or is it end-users? A CMS system is
> typically used by site staff to maintain the site -- defining content
> types, roles, workflow, etc.  However, in Zope CMF, I see an awful lot
> of stuff related to end-users personalizing their home page,
> contributing messages or discussion threads, etc -- not really
> "classical content", but rather, it's community and portal stuff. So the
> "Content Management" moniker doesn't seem to fit so neatly as, say,
> "portal, personalization, and community" might.

You're absolutely right - you *see* things relating to a community
portal.  But what you see isn't the CMF, it's the CMFDefault demo
site.  In a nutshell, the CMF is a *toolkit* for solving particular CM
problems like workflow and personalisation. 
Here's a list of the problems the CMF + Zope solves so far: 

- workflow
- metadata (Dublin Core)
- membership & roles-based security
- personalisation
- skins (content and presentation cleanly separated)
- multiple user interfaces (TTW, FTP, webDAV)
- content syndication
- indexing
- rolling back actions (undoing)

It doesn't have a solution for authors to create and edit web pages
based on complex templates, which I think a lot of people need; this
is in the pipeline for the next version.

There is nothing about the toolset which means you have to use it for
"portal, personalization, and community".  The reason many people get
this impression is because the demo site supplied with the CMF
fulfills this role.  I think in terms of a graphics toolkit. The CMF
is like GTK+: it provides widgets which solve common (GUI/CMS)
problems.  CMFDefault is like Gnome: it uses the underlying toolkit to
meet a specific requirement (Desktop / Community Portal).

seb