[Zope] - Slashdot on Zope

[Kevin Dangoor]

On Mon, Jan 18, 1999 at 06:38:03PM -0500, Paul Everitt wrote: 
,-----
| Kevin wrote:
| > This is the application that I have been looking at Zope for. 
| > I am thinking
| > of something that is a cross between Slashdot and c|net. (Or you can
| > think of it as Slashdot with a category hierarchy.)
| 
| We have a couple of consulting gigs in the hopper that hilight common
| threads through different community sites.  If we can do a good job of
| capturing the requirements, then documenting the interfaces for managed
| content, then the project can be used pretty widely.
| 
| As for the category hierarchy, the opportunities available thanks to
| Tabula are pretty awesome.

Glad to hear it! Your Zopespot message sounds like a great project.

| > Yes! I'd be interested in using/contributing to this. After 
| > seeing someone
| > else's message, I took a look at HTML::Mason for perl, and 
| > that just does
| > not have the same power that Zope does.
| 
| OK, should you choose to jump in, can you provide a summary of the
| features and limitations of Mason?

I've never run Mason, so I can't give you production environment insight
on it. However, I can tell you what I read and what I decided after
reading it...

Mason is, according to the documentation, the backend for CMP's websites.
Those are some pretty industrial-grade sites, so I think Mason has
established itself as a possible code base for a newsy sort of site.

Mason is made to run in mod_perl and pick up all of the web server requests.
It can also run as a standalone program that spits out HTML.

It breaks web pages up into "components". These components contain a mix
of HTML and perl. They are not entirely unlike DTML Methods in that they
can take arguments and return values. I believe that all of perl is exposed
to the components. There are also special commands for using components, etc.

At present, I am more comfortable with perl than python. (I did a lot of
python coding a couple years back, but have been working in perl most
recently). From that standpoint, Mason seemed kind of nice.

Drawbacks:

Mason seems to require total control over the webserver. I don't have the
money for a dedicated web hosting solution at the moment, so I need something
that can work with just standard user-level access to the server. It can
be used in "standalone" mode, though... and that would be an option.

There's a whole bunch of stuff built into Zope. The object database,
acquisition, permissions and the nice web-based management interface
are all things that are pre-built and very usable. Mason seems a bit more
do-it-yourself when it comes to these things.

|  
| --Paul
| 
`-----

While you're working on requirements for a communities package, let me add one
more thing to consider: It would be nice to be able to render static HTML
documents for some things. There is nothing faster for a webserver to
spit out than static HTML. I was thinking there could be a type of folder
with a destination property that could be rebuilt on command. I get the
impression that something like this would be easy to implement.

A bit more than a year ago, I wrote a perl program for doing Slashdot
sorts of things. This was functional, but never production. I started
working on a much cleaner rewrite. Then I encountered Slashdot and
investigated that code. Now, I've looked at Zope and Mason as well.

After all this, I've decided to start working on my sites with Zope.
I'll just put together my initial layout and content in Zope.
I will provide a relatively lame interface for reader submissions.
As new capabilities are built by DC, the growing Zope community
and myself, I'll integrate those as well... but Zope definitely looks
like the best platform to start things out on.

Kevin

-- 
Kevin Dangoor
kid@ans.net / 734-214-7349