[Zope] zope & document management systems

[mark dufour]

Hello all,

Some people at my university have developed a free, LGPL'ed, modular Document Management System. About a year ago, because of some other project, they were so disgusted by the licensing scheme of Documentum that they decided they would try and create a free alternative. After a few months of work by several people, it's starting to look very good, and they are thinking about doing a first release within the next few months.

I am thinking about writing a Zope plugin/extension for this Document Management System (excuse my terminology, I'm new to Zope,) that would enable its contents to be accessed/searched through uniformly with other content, using Zope's generic framework. But as I'm rather new to Zope, it's difficult to see what would be the most natural way of accomplishing this. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. 

Specifically, the following would be important features:

-Users can upload documents and provide metadata which are subsequently copied into the DMS. 
-The metadata and document contents are indexed in the generic way, I believe it is called a ZCatalog :-)

I see that a product called 'ExternalFile' provides an abstraction for accessing files external to Zope. Would it be possible to enhance this product for my purposes? Or would it be more natural to use some other product as a starting point? As a final question, does anyone know of an earlier attempt at creating something similar, but for another DMS? 


Any help in this is greatly appreciated. Thanks, 

-- 
Mark Dufour.  

'I accidentally dropped "Mastering Regular Expressions" on my foot, and         
        immediately understood how to express "!@#$%^?&!"'