[Zope-CMF] CMF in CMF: my procedure

[Bruno Vernier]

Hello and thank you for the interesting thread on subportals.

I've spent this week studying and struggling with this issue and found a
solution that works for me, I have posted my notes in

http://zope.org/Members/vernier/Debian/CMF_in_CMF

I needed independent portals (separate learning communities, search catalogs,
membership,  etc..)  and still have only one central place to manage the
skins; and no need to worry about replicating common changes to each
subportal.

the following procedure works for me with one constraint explained later:

My Procedure for CMF within a CMF:
---------------------------------

1. Make a CMF within a CMF

2. put a siteroot object in it, update the VHF (Virtual Host Folder), update
Apache's directives
		
3. remove portal_skins folder entirely (it will acquire skins from the root CMF)
    
4. create a skin for this CMF in the root CMF (let's say Someskin)
	      
5. in Apache, make all connections to the sub-CMF add the
following to the URL: ?portal_skin=Someskin and add QSA to the directive's
flagset Otherwise search results will be wrong; it shows all objects
regardless of the keyword::

ReWrite *blahblah* *blahblah*?portal_skin=Someskin [P,L,QSA] 

 - Otherwise, the default skin of the root CMF takes over (since there is no
place to store **portal_skin** attribute in the sub-CMF  *or change the
personalize method in all skins (see notes above)*

    
There is however one issue:    
    
Issue: **Preferences does not seem to allow skin selection at the subportal
level **

either the default skin is the one and only skin  for every subportal or
we can force a single portal_skin for subportals with the apache directive
(I imagine that those for whom this is an issue can use one of the other 
techniques discussed in this thread or use a clever site access rule)

when I say, preferences does not allow skin selection, I mean: it seems
when I choose a different skin, it goes back to either the default except
strangely for the old Deutsch skin.  I use CMF 1.2 and Zope 2.5 on linux.


Bruno