[Zope3-Users] need guidance

[Duncan McGreggor]

On Nov 29, 2005, at 3:45 PM, Brad Allen wrote:

> I'm still in the midst of an effort at learning Zope 3, while try to 
> build a real website for it. I have ambitions for using Zope 3 in 
> several different projects, and am actively working on a Zope 3 
> website that I hope to have looking presentable if not fully 
> functional by mid-December.

Do you have a zope2 background? With a background in zope2 and twisted, 
I found z3 very easy (delightful) to learn. My first z3 site was done 
from scratch, with graphic design, custom user-editable content in 
under 3 weeks. I was an instant z3 fan.

> Another Zope 3 project for the future is to convert an ecommerce site 
> I had previously built in PHP. I've been using Python at my day job 
> now for a couple of years, and have decided I no longer have time for 
> PHP--I want to switch the site to Python, probably using Zope 3. This 
> site's main purpose is to allow customers to search, view, and 
> purchase from a catalog of auto parts.

You will definitely want to start getting familiar with pythonic site 
creation in z3, particularly, setting up a catalog (IntId, Catalog, 
Index-creation, etc.). All of my query needs are met (so far) by simple 
python calls to catalog.SearchResults and then a lambda for sorting. 
Martijn Faassen wrote a great query wrapper called "hurry" that you 
will almost certainly want to investigate/use:
   http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2005/09/09/0

> For the auto parts site, I am thinking about designing an AutoPart 
> content component. This will allow the business owner to edit his 
> catalog of auto parts via the web. Suppose he starts instantiating a 
> lot of auto parts, and editing them. Later, we decide we need to 
> refactor the base class, and maybe create a few child classes. That 
> leaves me with a big cleanup chore, because a lot of old AutoPart 
> instances are sitting around in the database.

As Chris mentioned before, to my understanding, this is a perfect 
use-case for generations, so you should be covered (if it's up to 
date...).

> I'm trying to come to an understanding of when it's best to keep data 
> in the ZODB, and when it's best to use SQL instead. Maybe there are 
> tools for handling ZODB data that I don't know about.

As a general trend, people that have highly-relational data tend to 
prefer using RDBMSs. I have no current projects for which I use an 
RDBMS, but I have in the past. I also have a very strong preference for 
object databases ;-)

> Another question about ZODB is whether to use it to store page 
> templates. If I build a lot of ZPT pages and macros and store them 
> through the ZMI, and then later want to rearrange the folder 
> structure, I'm guessing it will be a pain to change a lot of 
> hard-coded path references. If I use text files outside the ZODB, then 
> I can use a host of text editor tools for searching across multiple 
> files.

I think this has been answered. There's no current TTW dev. But you 
will come to dearly love filesystem dev, especially with multiple 
developers working on the same code ;-)

> I like the idea of letting end users have something like the ZMI for 
> editing content, and am hoping it will be possible avoid putting much 
> TAL and METAL markup in documents in the ZMI, but rather have the .pt 
> files pull content from the ZODB. However, it's not clear to me how to 
> make that work. The examples in the books have the .pt files in the 
> filesystem; I don't recall seeing any the ZMI/ZODB.

Perhaps I can clarify with a typical example:
* you have a z3 project, all the code is on the file system
* you will create custom content objects
* you will create a "skin" for the project -- this is how it will look 
to end users
* you can use the ZMI for administration tasks (such as 
creating/editing content) -- you can customize the ZMI to look like 
anything you want
* you can modify your custom skin to present various editing/management 
options to the end users

Perhaps this makes thins more clear?

> Here is another question. Suppose I'm working with a team of 
> developers. Should we each set up our own separate Zope3 instance, and 
> do SVN checkouts into our own separate, local /lib/python directories 
> inside the instance?

IMO, definitely ;-)

HTH,

d