[Zope] Customizing / borrowing code from /manage/ screens

[Loren Stafford]

I too am just getting started with CMF. I've added a CMF Portal to an
existing Intranet site and am in the process of figuring out how to use it
and migrating existing content to it.

I'm sure each person has different concepts regarding what CMF is and how it
should be used. Here are couple of mine:

CMF requires a change in the way you think about content organization.

1. Content has an owner and is located in the owner's "My Stuff" folder. You
can create subfolders and that may help the owner organize "His Stuff", but
a hierarchy of folders is not the way to present content to other users.

2. "Every request is a search query."  I can't imagine using CMF without
"Topics". Topics are canned queries. Many users will use the general search
function, but Topics can be used to created more conventional
categorizations -- the kinds of categories we used to implement with
folders. But with Topics, things are much more flexible. Now objects can
appear in multiple categories. To make this work you have to take control of
the objects' metadata -- specifically the "Subject" tokens. As I convert my
Intranet site to CMF, I'm using Topics to replace the original folders --
giving a compatible feel to the site, but increasing the ease of finding
stuff.

-- Loren


> From: Anders Schneiderman [mailto:schneida@seiu.org]
>
> Let me be a bit clearer.  I installed CMF w/o any problems and
> was able to
> create an insta-portal.  But when I tried to start customizing
> the sucker,
> I got lost.
>
> For ex, I used the "Folder contents" to add a few folders &
> documents.  But
> when I clicked on "view", they didn't show up.  So,
>
> A)  How do I get them to show up?
>
> B)  If I want to customize the way they're displayed--for example, allow
> for a "blurb" that explains what's in the folder--how do I go
> about doing that?
>