[Zope] Could I build this application with zope?

[John Hobson]

Thanks to those who have given it a quick glance, I appreciate it.

I absolutely want to use as much as I can off the shelf, the less coding
and modification I have to do the better!

I was looking at the plone user manual and a lot of the features in
there didn't seem to be that relevant, but certainly some of the
features in CMF could be built upon.  

The really important bit of the application is the workflow bit -
getting a course from business case stage to release, to being
withdrawn.  If my understanding is correct Dcworkflow is an object
based workflow solution, whereas I am looking for a process based
solution.  I found openflow which is processed based, this seems to fit
our requirements better.  The course (online) will never be directly
part of this system, just all of the meta information about it.  At
points in the process we know more information about the course
(duration, description, name, planned live date and documents such as
business case, invitation to tender etc) and this information would get
inputted to a RDBMS (probably mySQL).  So basically each stage of the
process will have a number of form fields that need to be filled in , or
documents uploaded by a number of users to advance to the next stage of
the process.

The thing that worries me about openflow is how easy it would be to
change the process.

I've not heard of Archetypes, I will take a look and see what that does.

We are also looking at proprietary business process management/change
management tools (e-work and infra) as an alternative to an oss
solution.

Thanks,
John

-----Original Message-----
From: Dylan Reinhardt [mailto:zope at dylanreinhardt.com] 
Sent: 27 November 2003 16:54
To: John Hobson
Cc: Zope Users
Subject: Re: [Zope] Could I build this application with zope?


On Thu, 2003-11-27 at 06:25, John Hobson wrote:
> Thanks to those who gave useful replies to my earlier post.  I am 
> still looking into using zope for my project.  It looks like the CMF 
> could provide a number of the features that I am looking for and that 
> a number of others would have to be custom developed.  Is it a 
> realitively straight-forward process to develop custom functionality?

Yes... but it's even easier to use what others have already developed. 
Extend Zope all you want, but make sure you're not reinventing the
wheel... unless you *want* a new wheel.  :-)

> 
> Follows is a brief synopsis of the functionality that I am looking 
> for, for this project, I would appreciate if anyone could take a quick

> look and let me know if zope may be suitable.

I didn't do any detailed analysis, but on first glance, yes.  

Not only that, more of this solution may be available off-the-shelf than
you realize.  Take a long, careful look at Plone and Archetypes before
you go messing with CMF yourself.  I'd bet Plone already does 90% of
what you want and Archetypes can pick up most of the rest.

HTH,

Dylan