[Zope3-dev] User Preferences System

[Stephan Richter]

Hello everyone,

as you might have read in the checkin messages, I have checked in a user 
preferences system. It is currently located inside the `apidoc` package, 
because it is more or less a protype, but I needed it for apidoc.

I am very happy about the way it turned out and it might be the beginning of a 
very flexible user preferences framework. The basic idea is that you use 
schemas to specify your preferences. Each schema represents a preferences 
group. The preferences (groups) can then be easily accessed via traversal 
paths, which makes them ideal for TAL.

For more details see src/zope/app/apidoc/preference/README.txt

I would like to start discussing such a system and see how it would need to be 
changed to accomedate broader range use cases.

Some of the nice properties of the current system:

* Easily accessible in TAL

* You can specify special edit screens for each reference group.

* Very easy to use, i.e. you create a schema and register it as a preference 
group.

* Preferences paths can be as complex as you like. Thus any hierarchical 
structure is supported. There is currently no ZCML support for this, but it 
is possible.

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training