[Zope-CMF] CMF for intranets, CMF inside CMF etc

larry_prikockis@NatureServe.org larry_prikockis@NatureServe.org
Mon, 11 Feb 2002 15:02:53 -0500


Well, perhaps Tres can jump in with anything I forget-- since I believe I
heard him refer to WISE as "the coolest Zope product" he's seen yet :-)

Basically, it seems the idea behind WISE is to allow non-technical web
content managers the ability to create custom web portals that conform to
some overall look & feel parameters determined by an administrator
collectively across all the portals.  

Each custom portal can consist of a collection of various "plugin" web page
objects, ranging from event calendars, todo lists, news feeds from other
sites, images, database search interfaces, etc (I believe David said there
were several dozen plugin objects available for site managers to choose
from).

These objects can be arranged by dynamically scaling, dragging and dropping
them to define the layout for the portal homepage.  This was the part that I
thought was really slick-- essentially, Zope already has a huge library of
"plug and play" (to varying degrees) objects with which you can build a
custom site-- but assembling these objects often requires a good deal of
messy integration work.  The WISE product looked (at least from the demo) as
polished and slick as any commerical content management product I've seen
(eGrail comes to mind...)

For the most part, the WISE developers apparently took some existing Zope
products, polished off a lot of the rough edges, built a friendly UI for
managing them, and turned them into a easy to use toolbox of ready-to-use
components.  As David pointed out, most of the users are military officers-
not techies :-)

For me, this demo was a great validation of what Zope is capable of.  If I
could've showed my management an example like this, they would've had a much
easier time buying into Zope initially (no offense to the Zope.org
community-- but as many have noted, the zope.org site tends to be friendlier
to open-source hackers than M$ conditioned IT managers.)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Edwards [mailto:jon@pcgs.freeserve.co.uk]
> Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 10:57 AM
> To: larry_prikockis@NatureServe.org
> Cc: zope-cmf@zope.org
> Subject: RE: [Zope-CMF] CMF for intranets, CMF inside CMF etc 
> 
> 
> Hi Larry,
> 
> WISE also got a good review on Zopezen, but it seems that as 
> it was built
> for NATO the source is a military secret! ;-)
> 
> Is there a copy of the presentation available on the net? 
> ...if not, could
> you give us some brief "bullet points" of what made it special?