[Zope-CMF] Q: CMF, Plone for a new Intranet

[Steve Arnold]

On Wed, 2002-06-05 at 09:27, Simon Brun wrote:
> hi all
> 
> I have to develop a new intranet homepage for our company. In this intranet
> you'll find stuff like documentations, presentations, guidelines, meeting
> protocols, etc. At the moment, every user have to use the Zope Management Screen
> to upload his stuff. Our 27 workers don't know how to use zope and they wack
> out!

The Zope management interface isn't really for document people, but CMF
and/or plone *is* what you're looking for.  There are a couple of good
basic docs on cmf.zope.org that should get you started.

> We decided now to enhance / redesign this intranet homepage by continuing the
> usage of Zope. When I was searching for products and documentations I found CMF
> and Plone. I installed the products and played around a couple of hours. It is
> very, very hard - at least for me - to get in and understand all the stuff...

You and me both :-0  I was just beginning to understand zope and dtml,
and then CMF threw in page templates (in 1.2).  Now I'm lost again...  I
just haven't had much time to devote to research, but there have been
several Zope articles in Linux Journal lately, including one or two on
page templates. I'm still learning python too, so it's been  a little
rough.  I'd suggest spending some time (as much as you can) with the
Zope book (online at zope.org) and the docs on the python site.

> Now my questions:
> - Does it make sense to use Plone for this type of Intranet?

Either plone or straight CMF would make sense; I here plone is more of a
complete out-of-the-box thing (but slower than CMF), whereas CMF is more
of a generic framework.  I guess it depends on whether the
plone-specific stuff meets your requirements (you *do* have some kind of
requirements specification, right?).

> - Every worker should upload his documents in the matching directory (there is
> no reviewer). Does this need a lot of scripting?

I'm not sure what you mean by that first part.  In CMF, all content is
owned by the user who created it.  It's not visible to other users until
it gets "published" (see the basic CMF workflow stuff).  Normally,
content resides in the home folder of the owner (or a sub-folder) but
certain types of content are automatically cataloged and appear in
special places (like News or the Calendar) depending on their type.  You
can create your own content types (even based on M$ office file formats)
and your own workflows too. 

> - Where can I find a good documentation (like "get started with CMF and plone")?

Not sure about plone (haven't tried it yet) but the basic CMF doc is:

http://cmf.zope.org/CMF/Members/beehive/ZWACKChap5.html

There are also relevant chapters in the Zope book:

http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/

You should also create one or two CMF and plone portals, give yourself
management rights, and create a few portal users (without some custom
scripting, main page content must be added by the management user,
although they're not actually a portal member).  Browse the management
interface of your portals and check out the Types tool, the Worflows
tool, the Catalog tool, and the Skins tool.  The presentation stuff (ie,
the look and feel) is defined by the different skins, using either dtml
or page templates.  After that, I can't help you much...

> Not sure if I'm too less experienced or too stupid for this stuff, but I'm
> really stuck!

Browse the portal management interface, experiment, read the docs,
experiment, read the docs, browse the portal management interface...

That's how I'm muddling through, since I haven't had time to dig into
ZPT, etc.  I barely have time to fix up the mess I created with my
latest Zope upgrade (my existing CMF portals didn't survive well, but I
finally got my squishdot sites all fixed up).  It's a battle...

> Hope to get some inputs...

About 3 cents worth...

Steve