[Zope-CMF] Plone/Metadata/FUD

[Jeffrey P Shell]

On Thursday, October 3, 2002, at 05:54  AM, Chris Withers wrote:

> seb bacon wrote:
>> One observation I draw from this discussion is that we should have 
>> some kind of conceptual / infrastructural framework for 
>> differentiating between Implementations (CMFDefault / Plone) and 
>> Framework (CMFCore).
> >
> > Ever since the CMF began, most people consistently (and 
> understandably)
> > don't get the relationship  between Core and Default.
>
> That's 'cos there are severla things in CMFDefault which probably 
> belong in CMFCore. CMFTopic should probably be in there, DCWorfklow 
> should definitely be in there. The rest should either be merged into 
> CMFDefault or not ship in the default CMF package. I think that alone 
> would clear up a lot of confusion about what is and isn't CMF. I think 
> things like Workspaces, Wiki, Tracker and Collector could also do with 
> loosing their CMF Prefix. It makes them sound liek they're part of CMF 
> core, wheras they feel more like Plone/MMManager/etc equivalents to > me.

Should CMF Topic be in the core?  I haven't used it in any of my CMF 
Sites lately.  The thing I dislike most about the CMF/CMFDefault setup 
is that it currently takes too long to turn OFF "features".  Soon, 
hopefully, I'll have my own 'default' layer in place that has all of 
the commonly used replacement tools and data types we've built or 
extended that suits our needs.

>> 1) Download the CMF (actually just CMFCore)
>> 2) Download an implementation (currently a choice of CMFDefault, 
>> Plone, mmmanager...)
>
> Yeah, this is a very good idea. It would also make sure that _all_ 
> thye necessary framework was in CMFCore, and would remove the need to 
> for confusing unpack-then-copy-subfolders-to-Products-directory which 
> trips up so many new users.

I agree with this.  But there are still muddy lines between "what is 
framework?" and "what is product?"  DCWorkflow is not framework - it's 
a product that is a very good example of the flexibility of the CMF 
Workflow engines plugin agent architecture.  CMFTopic and CMFEvent are 
useful for some situations, but not all (if/when topic based indexes 
are added to the catalog, CMFTopic might be a more useful Core element).

And I think this makes it evident that different people have different 
expectations of what is Core - some want heaps of functionality already 
built for them, others (like me) want something light but powerful to 
build on.  I've had to do a few content management sites without the 
CMF because it ended up adding too much weight that wasn't necessary, 
yet the whole time I was building those sites I was missing certain 
elements like Workflow, the Types Tool, and the configuration of the 
Portal Catalog; but I was grateful not to have syndication, membership, 
and all sorts of other little things that (at least in CMF 1.2) 
required too much work to tone down or disable.


Jeffrey P Shell, jeffrey@cuemedia.com