[Zope-CMF] university portal: some advice ?

[Rex Chung]

Forgive me for posting here as well, CMF list might be more relevant to
my problem.

I have been given the task to implement my College's CSE homepage
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/ with Zope for the sake of content
management. I have looked at Plone and CMF and gone through the Zope
book. (though I have no experience with Zope).

I am wondering if using Plone/CMF would help me implement such a site or
how will it help. I need the user management component but can I do it
with Zope's user management and using ZMI as the content management
interface. 

I'm still a bit confused on how to model such a system or given the
database schema rather, into Zope Products/Zclass etc. 

I am thinking I need to write a class/timetable product, extend users
properties, rooms/facilities product and courses/program product. But
the problem is that some of the content cross over different products
eg. staff's office room from staff/users module would exist in
rooms/facilities module. 

I am given this database schema that I should be using, here are the
tables:

advancedstanding
affiliation
area
areaaccess
book
building
buildingaccess
class
lassenrolment
classenrolmentaudit
classenrolmentwaitlist
classteacher
classtype
country
course
coursebook
courseenrolment
courseenrolmentaudit
courseenrolmentwaitlist
coursequota
courserole
coursestaff
degree
facility
fax
institution
jobclass
officeaccess
orgunit
orgunittype
erson
personproject
personresearch
plan
postgrad
program
programenrolment
programschedule
publicholidays
researcharea
researchproject
room
roomfacility
roomtype
session
staff
staffdegree
taffqual
taffrole
tanding
student
studentgroup
subject
subjectequivalence
subjectgroup
subjectgroupmember
thesis
unitgroups
=======================

How does Zope, as a CMS make it easier for me to manage such contents?

Thanks.
Rex

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Renfro [mailto:mwr@cae.tntech.edu] On Behalf Of Mike Renfro
Sent: Sunday, 29 September 2002 7:39 AM
To: Rex Chung
Cc: zope@zope.org
Subject: Re: [Zope] some advice ?

On Sun, Sep 29, 2002 at 02:45:00AM +1000, Rex Chung wrote:

> I am wondering if using Plone/CMF would help me implement such a
> site or how will it help. I need the user management component but
> can I do it with Zope's user management and using ZMI as the content
> management interface.

If by "user management", you mean "separate accounts for a relatively
small number of people creating content", then pure Zope would
suffice. If you mean "everybody gets a customized view of the site
based on their username/password, and I want to build a portal", then
you'd probably need CMF or Plone.

> I am most confused with the content type, since what I need is
probably
> a course/timetable management product and different type of users have
> different properties.

Your timetable manager is done in CGI, and I have no idea regarding
its supporting data structures. So it's tough to make any
recommendation on how to convert it. You may even decide that that
portion of the site doesn't need to be Zope-managed. Depending on what
you want in a "course product", I'd probably start with MaxM's Easy
Product (http://www.zope.org/Members/maxm/HowTo/easyProduct), which is
exactly what I did for my local "lab software", "lab book", and "lab
computer" products, seen at http://www.cae.tntech.edu/about/software ,
http://www.cae.tntech.edu/help/library , and
http://www.cae.tntech.edu/about/hardware , respectively.

> I'm open to any advice/suggestions as to what is the best/easiest
> way to implement the CSE homepage.

If the goals are to:

- produce consistently-themed pages, including navigational elements

- delegate responsibilities for different areas to different people

then that's all entirely possible without CMF or Plone.

-- 
Mike Renfro  / R&D Engineer, Center for Manufacturing Research,
931 372-3601 / Tennessee Technological University -- renfro@tntech.edu


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