[Zope-dev] Distributing Zope & one of our products

[Simon Coles]

Hi,

You may know that as well as doing Cool Things With Zope, we also do stuff 
with Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) - not using Zope unfortunately, but 
that's another story.

Anyway, we have come up with an Open Source ELN (OS-ELN), which is based on 
Zope and the CMF. Readers of this forum will not be surprised to know that 
it didn't take much to turn Zope + CMF into quite a nice little ELN. For 
the curious, you can download what we have at http://www.opensourceeln.org/

What we're trying to do is make this thing approachable for people who 
don't know Zope, and indeed are somewhat unfamiliar with installing Open 
Source stuff on their machines.

Our primary target for a more approachable install is Windows users, as we 
feel Linux users are probably going to be OK with a more manual install.

The ideal would be to have single file they double click to install, answer 
a couple of simple questions in the install process, and then point their 
browser at their running ELN. Kind of like the existing Zope for Windows 
binary install...

But of course at the moment we have to get them to:
		- install Zope
		- get, expand, and install the CMF (which is distributed as a .tgz, rather
    confounding Windows users)
  - get our product and expand/install it
  - then log in as the inituser, create a normal user, log out, log back in,
    create an ELN, then log out, then access the ELN, and join in the normal
    CMF fashion

What I'd like to do is customise the existing Zope installer to include the 
CMF and our OS-ELN, and to have an already-setup Data.fs.

That would really reduce the amount of work someone had to do to download 
and start playing with this, and of course once they've had a play they may 
well decide to invest more time in learning Zope and setting up a proper 
server for production use.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to the desirability of this, and the best 
way of doing it?

(BTW, I've always felt that "products" like Squishdot would really benefit 
from something like this as well. Maybe when Chris sees how easy this is to 
do for the OS-ELN.... ;-)

Thanks for any help,



Simon

--------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ----------
Simon J. Coles                                 Email: simon@nipltd.com
New Information Paradigms                  Work Phone: +44 1344 753703
http://www.nipltd.com/                     Work Fax:   +44 1344 753742
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