[Zope] OSES project - should it run under Zope?

[Kevin Dangoor]

Hi,

--- Cees de Groot <cg@cdegroot.com> wrote:
> I was off this list for the last half year or so, so
> I'm in for some catching 
> up :-). 

I think a lot has been happening in that time :)

[deletia]

> Q1: is Zope the best environment to do this on? On
> the collaboration part, 
> Zope's user features are great, and Confera is ok as
> well, but other things 
> are lacking (chat, public file repositories,
> interfaces to CVS maybe, talkback 
> areas at the bottom of most pages, etcetera).

I think Zope offers many, many useful things for
collaboration. The Zope Portal Toolkit fills in some
gaps to make it a fabulous tool.

In general, I think the ZClasses and Catalog features
(both in alpha) make "rolling your own" very easy.
And, you can reuse the components you create very
easily.

Specifically:

chat: there are lots of chat solutions out there. I'm
not sure if a Zope-based chat system would offer much
value.

file repositories: check in the Zope email archives
(available on egroups or in the community section of
the Zope site) for a message from Paul Everitt just a
couple of days ago. He wrote about the things that DC
is planning to do in this area. I think a file
repository is the type of thing that ZClasses and
Catalog make easy to create a custom version that does
just what you want.

CVS interfaces: depending on your needs, you may be
able to whip this up with some External Methods...

talkback at the bottom of the page: One way you can do
this is by having something in your
standard_html_footer template with a link to a Confera
topic...

My feeling, in general, is that there may be a slew of
applications that are not pre-built with Zope. *But*,
they're pretty easy to build in Zope today and will be
even easy with ZClasses and Catalog once those are in
their final form.

[wiki stuff deleted... I don't know anything about
this.]

> Q3: if the answer on Q1 is "yes", are there any Zope
> gurus out there who want 
> to help me on structuring the site, maybe writing
> some of the utilities that 
> are missing? One of the reasons for picking Zope is
> that I'm considering 
> making the add-ons for collaboration available as
> part of the project, so that 
> schools can run Zope (Zope fits the OSES
> requirements for platform 
> independence, that's a very big benefit).

I think there will an increase in contributed Zope
Products once everyone has deployed Zope2. And
anything you (and others) build for your project will
be really easy to package up and distribute to any
schools that want to use it.

> Q4: (this should be an easy one - maybe I've missed
> a FAQ somewhere?) What's 
> the easiest way to have "last modified ... by ..."
> on the bottom of each page?

I think <!--#var bobobase_modification_time--> will
get you the time of modification. I don't know about
the 'who' modified part...

Kevin
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