[Zope] Newbie Q: Zope Best Practices

davelehman@loewen.com davelehman@loewen.com
Wed, 16 May 2001 08:26:52 -0500


I wish to humbly solicit some advice from some seasoned Zope
developers:

After reading most of the Zope documentation I could find, I'm
creating an intranet application as my first Zope websites. I'm
trying to make a news page that would be suitable (read "simple
enough") for a non-techy to maintain. So a "news admin" would be able
to add/edit/remove news stories. And a summary of all current news
stories would show up on the main "news" page. Each summary would
have a title, abstract and a link to the full news story page.

OK, so anticipating that we would like to archive the news stories
and make them searchable, and that there will be quite a few of them
(several a day), what would be the best way to implement this? Here
are the ways i've though of, some of which i've tried implementing to
some extent:

1. Create a "NewsStory" ZClass. The newsadmin can login to the Zope
management interface and select "News Story" from the add list. Each
news story creates a separate object in the "news" folder. This works
OK initially, but after a while, there would be tons of items in this
folder which would be a little unwieldly to manage. Also, it seems
using a ZClass for anything is sneered at by seasoned developers?

2. Store all stories in an RDBMS. I mocked this up using ZGadfly, and
I suppose it would be almost as easy to hook up to MySQL instead.
Would this be the "right" way to do it, or is it better to store the
stuff right in your ZODB instead?

3. Store the stories as objects in the ZODB-- not quite sure what i'm
talking about on this one yet, but SquishDot does something like
this, and i've been reading through the squishdot source trying to
figure it out. Is this substantially the same, or different than (1)?

I know i'm a complete newbie on this one-- would anyone care to offer
some advice on how to proceed?

Regards,
Dave