[Zope-CMF] RE: Re: [Zope] A Tale from IBM land...

seb bacon seb@jamkit.com
Wed, 27 Jun 2001 11:36:27 +0100


* Jon Edwards <jon@pcgs.freeserve.co.uk> [010627 00:54]:
> How about some docs (or even utilities) on how to convert from
> Broadvision/Vignette/Microsoft CMS to Zope "in 5 easy steps"?
> 
> ...and back again! < snip >

That's very sensible.  We've been talking about this a bit, and
we've come up with some very simple steps to make in this direction,
for our CMF-based CMS.

One idea is an 'ftp upload' product.  People can create their websites
using Zope, then go to the FtpUploader, type in their remote FTP
accounts, and it uploads a 'static' version to their webspace.

The reverse would be fairly simple - you could type in the address of
the site you wanted to suck in, and it would convert all the text and
image blocks into editable components.

One problem is that the CMF as is doesn't provide any out-of-the-box
CMS capabilities.  By CMS, I mean primarily the ability to add pages
based on a variety of templates (News, MultiPage with Images, etc),
and automatically generate a navigational system.  Various people have
implemented parts or all of this, but there's no consensus on the best
way of doing it.  Iuveno's system looks nice, but nonetheless we're
developing our own, as I'm sure many others are doing also.

Without a standard CMS framework, efforts to standardise
interoperability with other CMSs will be too diffuse to be useful.
I think the first step should be a consensus on the features and
implementation of a CMF-based CMS.  Two things that are crucially
important here, IMO, are the CompositeContainer idea discussed
elsewhere, and a navigation service / tool, which I haven't seen
discussed yet.

Anyway, back to work...

seb