[Zope] NeoBoard - Stupid Newbie Questions

[Philip Kilner]

Hi Wankyu,

> 1. NeoBoard managers are NOT necessarily Zope managers. You can 
> delegate management authorities to any "legitimate" Zope users
> under the tree where NeoBoard is created.
>

SO the user to whom management is delegated must be a legit Zope user, 
but need not be a Zope manger - OK, got that...

> You can't make non-Zope users NeoBoard managers.
>

..and that /is/ a mistake I have been making.

BTW, does NeoBard need a MailHost - or does it have it's own SMTP 
functionality? It hasn't asked me for a server, and I can't see how it 
could know /which/ MailHost to use...

> 2. NeoBoard has its own UI for management. It's because you don't
> want "thousands of messages" hogging the resources of your
> computer when accessed thru the standard ZMI. As far as I know, 
> ZMI offers little when it comes to dealing with a long list
> of objects. We're talking about thousands, even tens of thousands
> of objects here. So I thought better of resorting to ZMI. It'd be
> a bit stupid to let managers waste their time trying to
> access NeoBoard message objects thru ZMI. I gave it a try, but
> I ain't pretty.
>

Understood.

However, there are a few things that I /would/ like to be able to "get 
at", other than the raw message objects (I'd like to think I could work 
with these programmatically if not interactively, BTW). The most 
important is the document which "holds the board" - ideally, if this 
document were a DTML Method (Like Squishdot, which I have some 
experience with), I could then call this from my existing (DTML) page 
design...

> When logged in as NeoBoard manager or Zope manager, you can see 
> "Edit Properties" button just above the message list (along with
> Batch action buttons at the bottom). As a normal user, you can't
> see them. Clicking on the button lets you in on the
> NeoBoard Management UI including the management tabs. Only
> the "Contents" tab normal to Folderish objects is not visible. 
>


OK, got it!

> You can force the "Contents" tab on a particular message by 
> accessing it thru that particular message's "URL/manage"
> trick. 

That bit I don't get - could you expand on that, please?

> When I first started developing in Zope, Zope's user folders
> (the stock one, and other extended versions) baffled me in
> that they seemed to have been designed for a small set of users,
> not even thousands. ...[snip]... Am I missing something, or does
> Zope really want the getUserNames() method to return a million
> records if you have that many users, for example? Please, 
> enlighten me on this if I'm wrong. 
>

I don't know what the practical limits are - I guess I'd be looking at 
LDAP or something if I wanted to manage these sorts of numbers, for all 
sorts of reasons...Zope Gurus (of whom I am not one!) Might have a 
different PoV...

> I'm relatively new to Zope. It's only a month since I started 
> porting NeoBoard from PHP. So please, bear with me if any 
> of the above sounds "really stupid.":-)

You seem to be coming along nicely <g> - I'm a stringer-togther of 
other's pearls, rather than a coder (oyster?), But I hope you have as 
much fun with it as I do.

For the record, my last two posts to this lists have had good (e.g. 
Problem solving) responses in 20 minutes or so - you literally couldn't 
get better support if you paid for it - Thanks all!

Regards,

PhilK