[Zope] Easier maintenance than through management iface?

[Martin F Krafft]

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Hi Zopers,

Please excuse the length of this email. I'd greatly appreciate if
you'd read through it nevertheless and give me some feedback.

Our lab wants to change the website[1] over to a content management
system. I am not so much in favour of these Slashdot-like
PHP-integrated packages, and so I started looking into Zope. It's not
my first time that I am playing around with it, but I guess it's safe
to say that I am still a newbie.

  1. http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/ailab/

I would like to use Zope for this purpose because of the positive
feedback I got, and because it's an excellent opportunity for me to
learn Zope (which I wanted to do for a while) by doing it.

However, we have a couple of requirements for a CMS, and while I know
that Zope is very extensible (and it not really being a CMS per se),
I have not been able to meet these requirements with a test
installation (of Debian's Zope 2.5.1).

I like the management interface, but I can't expect everyone at the
lab to use it, nor can I really expect them to do either of ZPT or
DTML. Ideally, I want to get rid of HTML for the end-user as a whole.
I would like to provide templates for the main parts of the website
and let authorized users maintain the data contained through forms via
the web browser.

They should be able to do simple formatting (like in a Wiki), but they
should not be able to influence the structure of the documents.
I think about this in terms of a <span> tag surrounding the part that
a user can edit, and an edit button provided alongside (only if e.g.
the user comes from our IP space). The rest of the page they cannot
influence, they can only change the content.

My first question is: does Zope provide such a framework? I looked at
the CMF, but I didn't find what I was searching. I need no member
management (the authorized editors should be handled by Zope's ACLs),
I need no forum-posting-comment thing, but I want full control over
the structure and layout, while giving the authenticated users full
control over contents.

One way of approaching this is to use a database backend for the
information, and to provide simple editing forms for the user.
However, The data to be stored is not really susceptible to storage in
a relational database as it's too diverse. Moreover, I'd have to
provide editing forms for every type of modification, and last but not
least, the user could not edit in place but would have to go somewhere
entirely different if a change is needed.

I would like to roll out Zope, but I need to make it easier for the
users. Zope is way more powerful than HTML (obviously), but the only
argument that will fly and support my proposed change over to using
your (excellent) software is if the users' life will be simplified.
Can Zope achieve this?

Thanks, and sorry again for the length of this post! If we're
successful it is likely that the entire computer science department of
the University of Zurich will soon follow...

--=20
Martin F. Krafft                   Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Ph.D. Student                      Department of Information Technology
Email: krafft@ifi.unizh.ch         University of Zurich
Tel: +41.(0)1.63-54323             Winterthurerstrasse 190
http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/~krafft/   CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland
=20
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