[thelist] Zope - opinions

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Fri Mar 1 03:59:01 CST 2002


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Subject:    [thelist] Zope - opinions

>We have a new director and she imagines that we should
>be able to move minor updating to our data entry
>people.  Zope was recommended as it provides content
>management without the person knowing code but I
>personally feel it is just as easy to tell the person
>to just open up the content.ext file and edit it in
>notepad.

Hi Eöl

What you're describing is pretty much the starting point for *any* CMS
implementation - the deskilling of the publishing process (and
concentration of skilled staff on more complex tasks).

What most CMSs do (and Zope does pretty well) is separate content,
presentation and logic into separate layers - it sounds like you've done
some of that already (at least separating content and template) - and
enforce security policies on each.

So if you've got a header file, a footer file and a content file, you can
restrict editing of each (and a number of other tasks) to specific roles.
Assign users to roles and you've got a security system in place without
having to code it yourself.

Another handy thing if you're expanding the number of people with rights to
edit content is version control, with rollback. Believe me, you *will* face
a situation where you need this, either through simple accident, or malice
(I once had a content author replace photos of board members with sheep).
At that point, an audit trail and rollback you can control on a per-asset
basis without digging out backup tapes will be useful.

>I find easy to just explain to data entry
>people to just edit content.php but the new director
>isn't so sure on this.

For you, this (and editing context.ext in Notepad) this is very easy. For
most office workers with no special technology skills, this tends to be
very complex, and causes a lot of fear. Add in a requirement to use FTP
(again, very easy for you and for me), then you tend to get resistance to
updating content.

If you can make the editing process as easy as possible for the office
staff, and using tools they already know and feel comfortable with, your
change management will be *so* much easier.

>While I understand the usage of zope (and it is a good
>sytem) for dynamic content that changes regular and
>requires tracking, I just don't see need for it in my
>situation.

Here's a suggestion - produce a pilot. Revelop a small section of the site
with Zope, and hand that over to office staff and see how it goes. At the
end of a sensible test period, take a step back and evaluate how it went.

>So basically, I am jsut looking to gather some
>opinions on Zope.

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Download a copy and have a play -
there's versions for pretty much every platform.

You get all kinds of nice stuff out of the box, and a bunch of systems
(like bulletin boards, wikis, slashdot clones etc) running on top which are
already reasonably stable without you having to do much to them other than
tweak the presentation layer to match your own needs.

The thing I'm most happy about is to be able to bundle a number of
properties within a single object (all pages are objects), like all your
meta data. When you call the header from the object, the header can use the
*object's* properties to insert as variables.

It plays very nicely with GoLive too - you can use FTP or WebDAV to connect
to your Zope server and it all integrates nicely.

Cheers
Martin


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