[Zope] Inheritance and the Search Engine : A Tragic Tale of Romance

[Edward Pollard]

Greetings Zopers,

I've got a quandary that I would like to solicit wisdom on.

We are running Zope 2.6 as part of our website. Our central search 
engine that spans all our websites is running on ht-dig. Inheritance on 
zope is sending our search engine on infinite traversals of the Zope 
tree. This is caused, as you can probably guess, by relative linking 
(eg '../../blah.htm'), and one ill-formed url somewhere that gets the 
recursion started.

This is not good.

Now, I'm trying to create an environment where people can port their 
websites from the old non-templated world to the new Zope-templated 
one. However this necessitates a tolerance for bad coding, at the very 
least a tolerance so that one idiot with a (trivially) badly formatted 
url does not cause our search engine database to become somewhat close 
to useless as the same page is listed at 1000 distinct urls. Of course 
that just utterly destroys word search heuristics.

It being my opinion that I'm not doing something completely batty and 
unusual, I thought there might be someone out there with greater 
understanding with which to enlighten me.

Thanks for your time,

---
Edward J. Pollard
University of Lethbridge
Web Development