[thelist] Custom CMS

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Mon Apr 1 10:43:01 CST 2002


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Here are some general model you could follow with Zope:

>* Use Zope as your app server and its built-in user management features
>establishing ACLs, permissions and security.

Note that you can hide the Zope app server behind an Apache webserver. If
you need to support high levels of load, then you can round-robin load
balance with multiple webservers (either Apache or ZEO) getting the
content from the app server. If you want to go one better, you can set up
caching, either as RAMcaching in Zope or with an external caching server
like Squid.

The other thing you can do is to use the Zope server as a staging server,
and tune the system for modularity and ease of maintenance rather than
performance. You then mirror the resulting pages as static HTML to a
production box, which can be a vanilla Apache install.

>* Use Zope's CMF and DCWorkflow Products for setting up your content
>management roles and workflows.

Ben, this has been something which has puzzled me for a while. Now
obviously
CMF is great for community sites which have a certain look  to them eg:
http://www.zope.org/
http://www.zopezen.org/
http://www.zopenewbies.net/ (note the April Fool ;-) )
http://www.zopera.org/
and where every member has their own area.

But how genuinely useful are they when you don't have that kind of flat,
wide structure, and when the site is published by an institution with
a hierarchical IA?

And is there a more generic workflow product available other than the
normal version management functionality?

Also, if you want to integrate a Wiki, it's a bit more of a challenge under
a CMF framework.

>* Use Zope acquisition for writing documents once and deploying them in
>several sections. You'd still be able to use your breadcrumbs so it would
>look like the document was in different sections of the site. And with a
few
>lines of code, Zope will write the breadcrumb trail for you.

Note that Zope acquisition also creates headaches if you're not thinking
in a Zopish kind of way and need absolute references to files and folders
(eg for standard navigation widgets). It's not a showstopper by any means,
but it is important to be aware of.

Cheers
Martin.


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