[Zope-CMF] Understanding Tool Construction

[Tres Seaver]

On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 06:01, Chris Withers wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
> > Chris, your imagination is too limited here:  the existing tools cover
> > only a small slice of possible services / utilities.  On my current
> > project, we have added several *dozen* tools, of different flavors. 
> 
> Oh, cool. Can you give us soem examples?

This application is for publishing a major newspaper and related content
feeds.  None of these tools are included in the CMF, although some might
eventually land there (some are already available on cvs.zope.org,
though not supported):

 - Action icons tool (defines icon, title, etc. for actions baseed on
   category and action ID)

 - Ad policies tool (defines ad positions, setup tags, etc.)

 - Page assembly tool (builds pages from approved content assets)

 - Asset repository (holds content assets)

 - Asset types tool (defines sub-page-level views for assets)

 - Composites tool (manages drag-and-drop page layout actions)

 - Events tools

 - Feeds tool (holds multi-step feed definitions)

 - Scheduler tools (dispatches scheduled tasks)

 - File-based items tool (defines where on filesysetm and in URL-space
   binary bits for file-based assets and resources live)

 - Invalidation tool (propagates page update events out to a
   helper process, which can then purge / reload pages from the Squid
   caching tiers)

 - Listeners tool (maps events onto user-definable handlers)

 - Lock tool (UI-helper for querying / setting DAV locks)

 - Logger tool (allow PythonScripts to srite to the event log easily)

 - Messages tool (message drop for users / groups)

 - Navigation tool (generates dynamic nav fragments, based on folder
   properties)

 - Page locator tool (maps asset metadata to page locations)

 - Relationships tool (manages dependency information between pages
   and assets)

 - Schemas tool (defines content asset schemas by portal_type)

 - Sitemap tool (emits XML for consumption by Flash)

 - Site search tool (aggregates various catalog searches with external
   search plugins)

 - Tease-generation tool (defines policies for generating "tease list"
   assets)

The point is that many applications go beyond the model defined by
CMFCore's interfaces.  Tools capture the "interstitial" bits of the
application, where important functions are not directly bound to a
particular piece of content.

Tres.
-- 
===============================================================
Tres Seaver                                tseaver at zope.com
Zope Corporation      "Zope Dealers"       http://www.zope.com