[Zope] difference between Squishdot and Portal toolkit

[michel@digicool.com]

Tim Wilson <wilson@chemsun.chem.umn.edu> writes:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm just about to install Zope for the first time and would like to begin
> developing portal/Slashdot-like for my school district's home page. I'm a
> science teacher in the district who's being paid this summer to work on
> the page.
> 

Can we pay you to brainwash your students into thinking Zope is the
future? ;)

> I've been lurking on this list for a couple weeks now and reading as much
> as I can. Zope look awesome! I can't wait to start using it.
> 
> Before I get to that, I'm wondering if someone could briefly describe the
> difference between the Zope Portal Toolkit and the Squishdot product. It
> appears that the ZPT is an official Digital Creations product, while
> Squishdot is user-created. I know that ZPT requires 2.0.x (which I was
> going to install anyway). Do the two produts work together at all? I'm
> trying to figure out where to start.
> 

The two products can work fine together, and, in fact, would
compliment each other quite well.

Squishdot is based on a much earlier and simpler Digital Creations
product (now unsupported) called Confera.  Butch Landening (I hope I
spelled you last name right Butch) used confera as the basis for the
very impressive Squishdot, which is a weblog.  Confera is a discussion 
board product that was written in the pre-weblog days, and it happened 
to have a nice messaging core which Butch used for the message store in 
Squisdot.  In addition, Butch prettied it up mightily and added many
new and cool features.

Squishdot can be thought of as an out of the box solution to a Zope
based weblog.  The Zope Portal Toolkit on the other hand, is, as its
name implies, a collection of Zope products and Zope infrastructure
components that allow content developers to easily develop sites which
employ such features as Membership (the ability for users to
contribute in a distributed way to an entire site's content) site wide
searching, issue tracking in a sensible workflow environment, and
other features.  We anticipate Squishdot, with little modification, to 
be an important community contributed component of the Zope Portal
Toolkit.

As an example, you can use the ZPT's membership to allow your students 
to have their own 'home folder' where they can upload documents and
files related to their projects.  Site wide searching and cataloging
will allow your students to search the whole site, and catagoricaly
break down the various artifacts of their home folders.  Squishdot
will allow your students to originate and follow up on threads of
discussion among the whole 'community'.  Issue tracking will allow you 
to originate 'issues' which can then be tracked from actor to actor
(think of peer review on an assignment), with the actors typicly being 
members, or just email addresses for 'foreign' participants.

-Michel

> Later,
> Tim
> 
> --
> Timothy D. Wilson			"A little song, a little dance,
> University of MN, chem. dept.		a little seltzer down your 
> wilson@chem.umn.edu			pants."   -Chuckles the Clown
> Phone: (612) 625-9828                       as eulogized by Ted Baxter
> 
> 
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