[Zope] workflow question

[Rik Hoekstra]

  Is there any way in Zope to validate information
(news, new document) by third party before real
publishing.

  For example some people are alowed to put a document
in the folder but these documents must be validate by
some one else for real publishing.

  How can I do this kind of things with Zope? Is it
possible?

  Any suggestion? links? help?


[RH] There are several ways to accomplish this:
You could put the document in an 'incoming' folder and make a reviewer move
it to the publishing location (this also allows for letting the reviewer add
keywords/categories etc).

If the uploaded document goes directly to the documentation where it is
published, you could give it a property called 'approved'; reviewer invokes
dtml method which sets the approved property to 1. The document is not shown
unless the ' approved' == 1.
[untested simplistic dtml]

<dtml-unless "approved==0">
   <dtml-var <document>>
</dtml-unless>

I believe the Squishdot product
(http://www.zope.org/Members/butchland/Squishdot) allows for something like
this.

A third (more sophisticated) possibility is to combine the two approaches by
using the Catalog, more or less like the Zope site does:
contributions by members are submitted for approval to the Zope site
administrators, who then add them to the site's catalog. Then they are
available in pages that use the catalog for their contents (like the howto
pages, the products pages etc). In your case reviewers could also add
keywords/categories etc to the document before it is cataloged and the
catalog may index these. I do not think the Zope site approach is available
for the public, but it shouldn't be too difficult to implement it.

A related product is ZDP tools (http://www.zope.org/Members/roeder), which
does not exactly do this but may be a source of inspiration for workflow
management. Another workflow system in Zope is Xen (I do not have the URL
handy right now), but this may be overkill for your needs.

hth

Rik