[Zope-PTK] Search engine woes solved, sorta

Nolan Darilek nolan_d@bigfoot.com
Tue, 07 Mar 2000 17:11:00 -0600


>>>>> "Mike" == Mike Pelletier <mike@digicool.com> writes:

    Mike>     There's _always_ a way.  ;-)

Good! :)

    Mike>     You seem to want content to be automatically published
    Mike> on submission.

Not exactly. :)

I have no problem with the current publication mechanism. It suits my
needs quite nicely, in fact.

I'm designing a portal site in a community whose members change very
often, maybe twice a year. Right now I have /Members/nolan where I'll
write all of my personal articles for our newsletter, meeting
information, etc. But, when I leave the organization, we may wish to
delete /Members/nolan to free up space/resources, etc. So, I'm not
concerned with the publication mechanism; instead, I'm concerned about
how a community member's content can a) remain after he leaves and b)
be indexed in the Z catalog.

I've thought of two basic approaches. One approach is to use
PortalContent classes such as Document, NewsItem, my new Event class,
etc. for all searchable site content. Thus, I don't need to muck with
the Z catalog settings at all, and can still use the
publishing/approval mechanisms.

As an example of this, I'm writing basic howto's about certain site
activities to make using the site easy for anyone, but I'm not the
best writer (as you can probably tell by this email :). I'm concerned
that my document on how to advertise may be unclear, that I may not be
mentioning something that I should, etc. So, someone copies the text
of my document into their folder, edits it, and creates a new version
which I link to. When they leave the organization though, I'll need to
remember "Hey, the advertising document is in his user folder, so I
need to move it out." (Yes it'd make sense to just copy the document
into my folder, but I'm trying to anticipate what mistakes future site
maintainers may make.)

A perfectly logical solution to this is to create Documents in other
folders. For example, I have a regular /help folder. If I could select
'Document' just as easily as I select 'DTML Document/Method' and add
the document to this folder, I'd never have to worry about removing
someone's folder and breaking site-wide links. Similarly, if someone
writes an article for our newsletter, I don't want to erase it when I
remove their account, thus breaking links in the newsletter. So, I'm
trying to determine if it is somehow possible to a) create PortalContent
in the same manner that DTML Documents/Methods are created or b) add
specific, trusted, non-PortalContent objects into the Z catalog? For
some reason I can't get any of my non-PortalContent objects to index.

Anyhow, sorry if I've been a bit too verbose; hopefully you're so sick
of hearing about my problem that you understand it fully, and have
10-20 solutions for me. :) Thanks a bunch.