[Zope] Does Zope stack up as a portal?

Kyler Laird kyler-dated-1040578352.848fde@lairds.org
Mon, 16 Dec 2002 09:31:21 -0500


On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 09:33:18PM -0000, Paul Browning wrote:

> >This is going to be a horribly-formed request, but I'm looking for some
> >guidance on evaluating a product being pitched.  The product is UNICON
> >Academus.
> >	http://www.unicon.net/academus/products/overview.html
> >
> >It's based on uPortal
> >	http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/
> >a "free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-
> >education."  UNICON's offerings appear to be closed and, at least for
> >the authoring tool, MS Windows-only.
> >
> >I want Free tools.  uPortal is better than something like Blackboard,
> >but it still has some severe limitations due to its licensing.
> 
> Whoa. Don't confuse UNICON (about which I know precious little)
> and uPortal (about which I know a bit). Have you read the uPortal
> license?

Yes, and I'm sorry that I wasn't more clear.  I'm quite aware that
uPortal is a "free, sharable portal under development by institutions
of higher-education."  This is a Good Thing.  My objection is to
putting something closed (UNICON's Academus) on top of it.

'course I'm not nearly as comfortable with the thought of using 
another development environment.  I'd much prefer to stick with Zope
for *everything* instead of having multiple environments.

> I think you can get a powerful framework like Zope +/- CMF to do
> reproduce uPortal. But you'd have to write the code first.

One of the things I love about Zope is that it allows me to make tools
for people to reuse as content *providers*.  Universities are strange
places and I often feel like even within the Zope world, there's
little understanding of an environment where there are (tens of)
thousands of potential independent authors.  But Zope can be made to
work in this situation.  Any idea if uPortal lends itself to many
authors creating content and tools for each other?  Or does creating
useful tools require the equivalent of creating External Methods or
Products in Zope?

> There
> are some interesting developments like CMFPortlets

Ah...more stuff I hadn't seen already.  I like it.

> The University of Bristol wrestled with this question for
> a while - and then jumped both ways (uPortal for portal
> framework, Zope for CM framework).

Funny you'd mention them.  This is one of the pages I'd found
about uPortal:
	http://www.bris.ac.uk/is/projects/portal/docs/uob_portal_rubric2.html

> <http://www.bris.ac.uk/is/projects/portal/portalbytes>

Lots of good links there.  Thank you.

BTW, my tendancy right now is to investigate Fle3 and Plone (possibly
with NeoPortal additions).  I'm also finally jumping in to using
AbracadabraObjects and PropertyFolders (now that I hacked them to work
on my installation).  I'm getting more comfortable with being able to
assert that I can make a reasonable environment for everyone to use -
not just as consumers, but also as providers.

Thank you for the help.

--kyler