[Zope-dev] PTK thoughts

Kevin Dangoor kid@kendermedia.com
Wed, 19 Jan 2000 17:53:40 -0500


----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew M. Kuchling" <akuchlin@mems-exchange.org>
To: <zope-dev@zope.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2000 3:44 PM
Subject: [Zope-dev] PTK thoughts


>      * I find it strange that members are able to publish content at
>        all.  For most of the portals I can think of -- Yahoo, My
>        Netscape, etc. -- membership means you have access to various
>        features that run off scripts or databases, and you have some
>        sort of customized display.  The set of people who publish
>        content is much, much smaller than the set of all members.
>        Zope.org and community discussion forums are the only cases I can
>        think of where members publish content, and only on
>        Zope.org do people see anything like a management screen.

This is really site-dependent. I could see an Intranet manager really going
gaga over these features. I think people will want to pick and choose what
people can do and what interface they would use. On byproducts.com, we'll
want people to submit news items (and maybe some other custom objects), but
nothing else. We may wrap the process in our own wizards that are tailored
to what we do.

>        The general abstraction is that there can be an arbitrary set
>        of states, and some arbitrary criterion must be met before
>        transitioning from one state to another, instead of only 2
>        approved/not approved states.  This is obviously more
>        complicated, and probably too ambitious for the first version,
>        but it could make the PTK a useful foundation for intranet
>        applications, where you'd embody the way your business works in
>        Python code.

This does sound really useful, and much trickier to implement. Something
else that would be useful is something like Frontier's callback mechanism. I
honestly haven't installed and run Frontier, so I can't talk to specifics
about how their implementation works. But, the idea is that there are hooks
that allow you to make something happen when something else happens. (So,
rather than a hardcoded send email to <blah> when someone contributes
content, you could make a method that performs whatever actions you feel are
necessary when someone contributes content.)

Again, the callbacks are probably a bit much for the first go, but it's
always good to keep the future in mind when building something new.

Kevin