[Zope] News product + workflow

[Timothy Wilson]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to redesign some very simple news products I've developed for use
on my site. I'm going to call the new product SimpleNews and it will likely
contain two parts--a basic ZClass for a short list of announcements of the
type that my school broadcasts over the public address system twice a day
and a ZClass for longer reports of single events like concert reviews, a
story about one of our sports team's games, a letter from the principal,
etc.

My site is organized with the school district in the root of my zope and
subfolders for each school. I've created a number of users in subfolders
that are responsible for various portions of the site. No problem there.

I'd like to implement some sort of simple workflow whereby my regular users
would be able to publish announcements or news articles and have them
immediately visible to site visitors. I also want to allow others to be able
to submit news items for possible publication pending review by an official
reviewer.

Here are a few questions that I've come across:

1. I'd like to categorize the announcements and news by categories
corresponding to the different schools, sports, arts, academics, etc. This
will allow me to filter the news on a per site basis. But at the same time,
I don't want someone from Spam Elementary School reviewing announcements in
the Eggs Middle School category. What would be the best way to accomplish
that?

2. It's unclear to me how best to implement this simple workflow. I see two
possible solutions.

  a. Catalog each item immediately when it's submitted, but use a boolean
property (e.g., "published") that would determine whether that item is
visible to site visitors. The advantage of this method would be that I could
construct a ZCatalog query that would pull up a list of submitted items
requiring review by the site's reviewers. A disadvantage would be that I
would need to construct a filter to prevent the unpublished items from
appearing in every other ZCatalog query that I use on the site. Every time I
used a ZCatalog query, I would need to make sure it wasn't displaying
unpublished items.

  b. Delay cataloging until the item has been reviewed. The disadvantage of
this method could be making it harder for the reviewers to process the
submitted items.

It may be (in fact it's likely) that there's another solution that makes
much more sense. I would appreciate any feedback on this idea. Any Zope Zen
masters out there have any insight on this?

-Tim

--
Tim Wilson      |   Visit Sibley online:   | Check out:
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