[Zope] Best way to create a (real estate) property in Zope?

[Simon Forster]

While I've played a bit with Zope, I don't feel that I've got a decent 
understanding of how it works and how I should do things. I've got ZPT 
working and understand its concepts (although my grasp on the syntax is 
tenuous - but that's a familiarity thing). I'm using metal too. And 
I've got a python script grabbing form data and emailing it to me.

All fairly basic stuff. I need to move on.

As we run a couple of web sites for (real) estate agents (using 
different tools), I was toying with the idea of making something which 
would allow me to create properties (that's real estate properties. 
I'll call them houses from now on :-)

To keep things simple, each house will have an address, postcode, brief 
description, detailed description, number of bedrooms, number of 
bathrooms. We'll expand this later to include other attributes - 
including images and virtual tours, but for the time being lets keep 
things simple. Oh. For this example we need to bear in mind that we'll 
be searching on the number of bedrooms and/or bathrooms (which seems to 
be where ZCatalogs come into play. I'll look at these later - at the 
moment we just need to know that at some point we'll want to build in 
this search capability).

I have 2 problems:

1) How should I create my houses? Should I write a product? Use 
ZClasses? What?
2) What form should houses take? Folder like objects?

To answer my own questions:

I guess we're looking at a product here? Is that really the best way to 
go? I want to teach myself best practices so if this isn't the best way 
to go, please let me know. And do I _have_ to use DTML when creating 
products?

What form would houses take? I'm guessing they're folder like objects - 
but my grip on this is getting tenuous. At it's simplest a house would 
be a folder. In the folder would be a plain text file for brief 
description, another for detailed description, another for the number 
of rooms etc.

But this feels wrong. Shouldn't these be properties of the folder?

But if that's the case, why would houses be a folder like object? 
Wouldn't they be Python Script objects?

And then when I come to add images, what happens with them?

See. There's some basic concept which hasn't clicked with me. I'm 
waiting for that little <ahh />, now I understand the Zope concept.

Can anyone help me here. Firstly, with a different way of looking at 
Zope concepts. Secondly, with some solid, practical advice as to how my 
houses should be built. (Sorry. Weak willed. Couldn't resist).

Many thanks

Simon Forster
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