[Zope] Form Based Document Creation (Newbie)

[Stephan Vladimir Bugaj]

Hello,

I am brand new to Zope, and have a task-oriented
type of question.  

I'd like recommendations for the best way to do
what I'd like to do.  What I'd like to do is:

Create a variety of different forms which create
Zope documents.  The forms would have different
fields for different types of documents (though
they would all have certain fields in common,
such as author name... most of the fields would
be displayed as part of the document body)
I've not been able to figure out what is the
proper Zope way to do this...

Populate a variable associated with each doc
for "expected expiration release" (because I 
want to be able to find all docs which are 
either older than a certain age based on 
creation date, or which expire with the 
current release of our production software,
and then assign them to someone's todo list
to edit them)

Indeed, what I think I really want is to modify 
numerous copies of the master template for adding 
a document so that documentors can just add content 
and pick from a list of document types.  However,
I couldn't really figure out if I was going to
keep the maximum amount of residual sanity if I
did this by modifying all the templates by-hand,
or doing something more automatic with Zclasses,
or packages, or if I need to use the CMF or what...
I could just hack stuff in Perl CGI and MySQL to
do this, but if I learn the Zope way I'll become 
a better person, right?  :-)

I'd like to create applications to act on these
documents, and a whole lot more, but for starters
I figure I need to figure out how to make these
forms and start inputting docs that have the 
right structure to support my apps. 

Please advise. 

Thanks.

LL+P,
Stephan

 
-- 
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Stephan Vladimir Bugaj, Minister of Information
Pixar Animation Studios
1200 Park Ave, Emeryville, CA 94608