[Zope-CMF] ... departmental hierarchies with modified workflow

Ricardo Newbery newbery@greens.org
Wed, 13 Jun 2001 11:12:19 -0700


I've got a similar situation.

I've got a volunteer organization with several standing committees. 
Each committee needs to have its own set of managers and reviewers. 
But all should share the same userfolder and member population.

I decided to just install multiple instances of the CMF to prototype 
the application but eventually, it would be nice to just fold it all 
into one CMF site if I can just figure out how.  I'm thinking of a 
metadata field which tags the content as 'associated' with one or 
more committees but then I guess I would also need another field to 
track the multiple publish states by committee.  Alternately, maybe I 
can limit the 'association' to just a single committee selectable by 
the member which will probably make tracking the publish state 
easier.  Haven't decided which workflow would make to most sense in 
this group but I'm leaning toward the second option -- now if I can 
only figure out how to do it.

I would be very interested if anyone has a solution.

Also, I'm assuming that eventually we will have a method to assign 
the CMF roles via the CMF interface?  Otherwise, I'm going to be real 
busy reassigning roles as new folks join up, leave, or migrate from 
committee to committee.  I would prefer to have the coordinator of 
the executive committee (usually a non-techie) handle assigning 
committee manager roles and the committee 'managers' handle assigning 
committee 'reviewer' roles.  This way the work is nicely delegated 
and my support role is minimal.

Ricardo Newbery
newbery@dvgroup.com



>From: Jon Franz <jfranz@one.net>
>To: "'zope-cmf@zope.org'" <zope-cmf@zope.org>
>Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 11:31:51 -0400
>Subject: [Zope-CMF] two questions: default member page content, and 
>departmental hier
>  archies with modified workflow
>
>1) I've noticed that the default member home page is defined within
>MembershipTool.py, which seems to go against the idea of skinning this
>element
>of your site.  I can easily replace what the current default content is by
>modifying the default_member_content variable, but I would rather load this
>from a DTML method or such in a skin folder.  I'm digging into the code now,
>but was wondering if anyone could give me a quick pointer on how
>to programmatically grab the content within an object in one of the skin
>folders?
>
>2) My organization is using the CMF as the basis for our Intranet, as part
>of this, we need a more detailed workflow with more
>member roles.  Right now, I've got folders in the root of my CMF instance
>that are for each major department, and a property
>on the CMF instance to list those folders so I can create a nice list of
>departments.  I can continue this scheme and have these folders
>contain properties listing which subfolders are actual sub-departments, but
>this seems odd: I'd rather have the ability to define
>departments somewhere else, but no property type or such seems appropo
>offhand.
>
>In addition, I have requests for content
>that should be viewable only by members of a specific department!  thus I
>need to add a dept_reviewer and dept_manager role,
>and I need to allow objects to have a new state, maybe 'dept_published' ->
>all of which points to a property on the user(s) which
>list what departments they are in, and another for which ones they admin (I
>might be able to see content in the HR dept, but only
>manage stuff in a sub-department)... And on objects, I need a new metadata
>field to hold what dept the document is associated with
>(right now I'm limiting the vocabulary of subject to the departments) ->
>this all gets rather nasty, however.
>
>Has anyone else implemented such a system? where did you begin, and what
>should I keep in mind?  I'd be glad to
>see how someone else solved similar problems, especially if it was in a
>simpler manner...