[Zope] Users editing properties -- howto?

[Flynt]

Leigh Ann Hildebrand wrote:
> 
> Some background: I'm using Zope to create and manage an internal document
> library for engineers and developers. Because of the circumstances, website
> security isn't an issue; I don't have to require logins for users. I
> work in dtml only right now -- no python. I have only been doing so for
> a couple of weeks. I'm not a programmer. (Translation: use small words
> and don't assume I know how to do basic things yet!)
> 
> I've been asked to implement a keyword indexing/search feature. Documents
> are currently represented by dtml documents, with a "keywords" property
> of the type "tokens". I'm listing the keywords at the top of documents,
> by referencing <dtml-var keywords>.
> 
> I'd like for users to be able to use an "Add" feature to add a keyword
> to a document if they feel one is missing. That would involve an "Add
> keyword?" link, I guess. The result would be that the keyword property
> for that document would be modified.
> 
> Can anyone offer suggestions/examples for doing this? Are there problems
> with it? (Other than the problems with keyword indexing in general, please.)
> Is there some more elegant way to handle this, that I, as a non-python
> person Zope newbie, could handle?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Leigh Ann
> 
Hi Ann

This is not an answer quite to your topic. However, it might be
interesting for you anyway.

We started to use in our place internally something similar and we use
the CMF product for it (Zope 2.3.2 amd CMF 1.0). CMF works with a set of
metadata for each document (according to the Dublin Core Specification)
and we use one of those fields, *subject* as the key to categorize the
documents and files, that a user is uploading.

There is a simple default workflow built in, which forces any member to
submit his *to be published content* to a *reviewer*, who checks it and
then publishes it. However, if you don't want that step, you can easily
give everyone the role of a *reviewer* and thus the possibilty to
publish without a foregoing review step by another person.

On the entry page of the CMF you can put canned queryies (hand-crafted
or using the *topic* portal type) for all the subject keywords, which
any user writes into the metadata subject field of a document. This way,
the whole categorizing is steered by what the users give as keywords in
the subject field, without the necessity of intervention by third
parties (you may like to organize internally some house-keeping in
regard to what keywords are valid or not).

You can then easily get an always actual list of existing keywords in
the subject field by something like::

<h4>Until now, there are documents under the following topics:</h4>
<ul>
  <dtml-in expr="portal_catalog.uniqueValuesFor( 'Subject' )">

    <li>
    <font size="-1">
      <a
href="/Portal/search?Subject%3Atokens=&dtml-sequence-item;">&dtml-sequence-item;</a>
    </font>
    </li>

  </dtml-in>
</ul>

The CMF is developing quite fast at the moment and has it's own site:
http://cmf.zope.org/
and mailing list (look for the mailing-list listing on zope.org under
*ressources*).


There is another product called *Document Library*. I didn't it try out
yet (though will hopefully shortly). It doesn't require the CMF (so,
it's on top of Zope alone) and might be interesting for you as well. It
is quite new (the 0.1 alpha came out on the 4th of May). The URL is:
http://www.zope.org/Members/Kaivo/DocumentLibrary

Have fun, while exploring :-)

--Flynt