[Zope] Generating products that perform a smart clone of a master site?

[Hamish Lawson]

David

Thank you for your reply.

> With ZClasses you can use the Zope security support to control who
> updates what.  However, currently ZClasses can only go in the
> Control_Panel/Products folder.  This means that all tutors will see
> the products/classes used by all other tutors, which you say you wish
> to avoid.

I may have misled you about what I meant by the alien stuff that I
wanted tutors to avoid seeing.

I envisaged turning a tutor's site into a product that could be
instantiated. In order not to make copies of static files, I reckoned
that each folder in the tutor's original site would have to be made
into its own ZClass in order that the static files that were missing
from instances of the site could be found through inheritance. I'm
happy with a tutor's site being moved into the Products folder; the
stuff I wanted tutors to avoid seeing wasn't other products, since I
think it should be possible to provide them with an interface that
takes them straight to their own product. Rather I wasn't sure whether
it was possible to turn a tutor's site into a product that used
folderish ZClasses instead of ordinary folders, yet still have it feel
like their old site.

One issue with what I'm suggesting is this idea of every folder in the
tutor's productised site really being a folderish ZClass. I'm bothered
by this profusion of ZClasses. I think what I really need is the
concept of prototype folders, whereby if a folder in an instance of the
site didn't itself contain the required object, its prototype folder
would be looked in instead; the folders in the product would be just
ordinary folders rather than individual ZClasses, and folders within
the product instances would all be instances of a single
PrototypedFolder class (though obviously pointing to different folders
as their prototype), thus drastically reducing the number of classes
required. But I don't know whether such a prototype mechanism exists
for Zope.

Hamish Lawson
University of St Andrews, Scotland


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