[Zope] Zope wisdom needed

magnus@vestnett.no magnus@vestnett.no
Wed, 16 Feb 2000 21:10:35 +0100


Zope masters, listen, for the student has doubts.

I am building a Cope site that will be a cooperation tool for my workgroup.  Some
of the other group members are not extremely computer literate, so all my interfaces
have to be simple, and only contain the necessary functionality.

Now, in our work, we have Items.  Items have statistics and descriptions.  I want to
make it possible for the group members to manipulate Items.  I want them to be able
to see lists of Items, organized by different criteria.  I want them to be able to change
the statistics of Items.  I want them to be able to read and change the descriptions.
If they write a new description for an item offline, I want to enable them to upload
this description for the Item.  All this without them meeting the complexity of the
Zope "manage" interface, only my own home-built tables and forms.

After meditating on the Zope documentation, I have come to the belief that the right
thing to do will be to create a Product with a Z class that has statistics as properties
and a DTML document containing the descriptions.  However, confusion clouds my mind:

* How do I set properties from DTML, based on form input?
* How do I edit the contents of a DTML document from a DTML method?
* Is the structure I have chosen the best one?

-Magnus