[Zope] Portal idea

Paul Everitt paul@digicool.com
Sat, 04 Sep 1999 09:05:09 -0400


Tim Wilson wrote:
> I'm brewing an idea here about how I might use Zope to create a portal
> site for my school district that would be a resource for our community
> too. This has so many possibilities, I don't know where to start. I've
> been making a list of all the cool things I could include that would be of
> interest to parent and students alike. So far it's a long list.

No doubt!

> One of the items on the list is a community-wide calendar of events. I'm
> posting this note to see if this makes sense.
> 
> For my ZCalendar, then, I would want to list things like school sporting
> event, school music concerts, city council meetings, etc. Obviously, I
> could structure it in such a way that would give one person responsibility
> for the sporting events, another for music, etc.
>
> So, if I'm understanding Zope, the thing to do would be to create a ZClass
> called 'event' with properties such as title, time, date, location, etc.
> Could I have additional properties for certain events? Let's say sporting
> events would also have properties like sport (e.g., football), score  and
> opponent. Now I could use ZCatalog to gather all of the contributed events
> and publish them in some format that I design. Is this right?

You're correct!

> Now let's say that the big football game is over, and we'd like to publish
> the score on our site. Could I then go back to that event, add the
> information to the 'score' property and have ZCatalog publish the results?

Since "score" isn't common to all events, I imagine it wouldn't be part
of the catalog.  Rather, it would be part of the object that is part of
the catalog.  Meaning, you wouldn't index on score.

Perhaps to accomplish the goal of knowing the game is over you could
just ask the catalog for things that have changed.  When the score
changes, the update time changes, and the catalog will know it...

> Am I in the ballpark with this?

Ahh, a pun.  :^)

--Paul