[Zope] mems-exchange.org Zope work

[Michael R. Bernstein]

"Andrew M. Kuchling" wrote:
> 
> We went live with some revisions to our Web site last Saturday, and
> some of them will be of interest to Zopeheads.  The most significant
> new feature is a new version of the Sequence Builder, which is at:
> 
>     http://www.mems-exchange.org/z/process/builder/
> 
> <stuff deleted>
>
> Doing a Web-based user interface for this sort of thing is hard, and
> our UI is still clunky in various ways; suggestions for improvements
> are welcome.  I don't know of any other sites that tackle anything
> this complicated, because this is harder than "I want X copies of book
> Y"; instead, you're assembling a recipe where order matters.  If
> anyone knows of sites that do something similar, we'd love to hear
> about them; maybe we can borrow some UI ideas from them.

This sounds like it could be generalized into a workflow product. Many
business processes have order sensitive sequences. A generic workflow
product that could handle editorial workflow for a content site as
well as manufacturing workflow such as this, would be a _very nice_
addition to the Zope arsenal.

So you might want to look at existing workflow products to get your ui
ideas. Allaire Spectra has some nice ideas WRT creating workflow
objects(sequences), then creating 'jobs' (workflow object
_instances_), and handing off the tasks in the sequence to the
appropriate people. I believe that it can also designate automatic
handling of certain tasks without human intervention.

HTH,

Michael.