[Zope] Re: difference between Squishdot and Portal toolkit

[Butch Landingin]

From my understanding of the Zope Portal Toolkit, its "an easily integrated set of technologies
that will allow Zope developers to build high-performance, dynamic portal sites ". 

My own take on this is that it provides an "infrastructure", a set of basic building blocks, that
make it easy to build highly dynamic websites. Squishdot ,on the other hand, is more on the level
of an "application" -- it builds on the facilities provided by Zope to give you a very specific
set of capabilities to fulfill a particular goal -- a place to publish short news items and hold
threaded discussions about them -- with a minimum of configuration while at the same time, be 
flexible enough to fulfill a wide range of new publishing and discussion needs (need to take a
breath after that long sentence, hew :^))

While there are some areas of overlap (specifically, the News portion of ZPT may have the
same functions as Squishdot -- but in truth, since I only have a very meagre understanding
of the details of ZPT, I really don't know), ZPT covers much more ground than Squishdot.

On the other hand, my intent with Squishdot is to integrate and use the ZPT where it makes sense.
For example, I'm studying the ZCatalog intently to see what benefits I get if I use it as the
indexing mechanism, instead of using the Index and TextIndex classes from Zope. Another thing I
am excitedly waiting for is the Membership capabilities. I am hoping this would allow Squishdot 
to provide user customization and tracking features (i.e. membership registration,login/logout,
ability to filter content based on user preferences, etc).

<BLATANT PLUG> I would urge you to try out Squishdot and see for yourself whether it fulfills
your needs. </BLATANT PLUG> I intended it to be easy to use and is heavily documented so you
can extend it to fit your needs if it doesnt already :^). 


Butch Landingin
butchland@yahoo.com

P.S. BTW, its available at the Squishdot home page (members.tripod.com/squishdot/index.html)
and at the Zope contributed products page (www.zope.org/Download/Contrib)

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