[Zope] the big 3: directory, search, news

Karl Fast fast@lights.com
Sat, 10 Apr 1999 21:53:34 -0600 (CST)


I don't know how many people read Jakob Nielsen, but his latest Alertbox
column talks about "intranet portal home pages" and the most important
components of a successful intranet. He calls these "The Big 3". A
shortened version of the article:

1. A directory hierarchy that structures all content on the intranet.
   This part of an intranet is sometimes called a "Mini-Yahoo."

2. A search field connecting to a search engine that indexes all pages
   on the intranet. 

3. Current news about the company and employee interests. Typically,
   the intranet home page can replace traditional employee newsletters and
   the flood of email announcements and memos that reduce productivity in
   many companies. Coupling the news listings with an archive and a good
   search engine ensures that employees can retrieve information as
   needed and frees them from having to store and manage local copies
   (something that is very expensive considering the poor information
   management capabilities of current email software). 

Assuming he's write, and assuming that the Zope is being used on intranets
and intranet-like environments, I'm wondering if these types of things
exist for Zope. If yes, where are they and how powerful are they? If not,
would it be useful to build them and have them either included with zope
or readily downloaded. The more zope can do out of the box, the better.
Yes?

Now I know what you're thinking, "Hey, a volunteer". I would love to, but
I'm just learning zope and python and have been sick for nearly 3 weeks,
putting me 5 or 6 weeks behind. I'm swamped. No time. Not enough
experience. Documentation, maybe. Code, not right now.

Oh, the Nielsen column is here:

Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure
April 4, 1999
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990404.html