Anyone with z3ext experience?
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Jean Jordaan
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Hi there
Recently we were searching for a way to get a community site setup quickly. By this we mean a site where users can sign up and participate in forums, upload documents and media, blog, write comments on uploads, and publish some information about themselves. Though Plone has had a number of forum and blogging products, none of them have caught on to a large extent. Plone itself is using Nabble to provide forum services, and I've seen a number of statements that this is not a focus for Plone. While looking around, we came across z3ext.net, another Zope 3-based CMS with a different focus than Plone. Out of the box, it caters very nicely for our use case. It also uses the ZODB for storage, and of course has many z3 modules in common with Plone. Unfortunately, there isn't much documentation yet. Out of 150 z3ext packages in our instance, there are 24 readme files, of which 4 are in Russian. The developers are eager to get z3ext more well known, and invite questions on their forum at http://z3ext.net/ I'm posting this to try and encourage some discussion, which I can learn from :-) Some of the things I'm wondering about: - what are the possibilities of accessing z3ext objects from Plone and vice versa, if the same ZEO server serves both databases? - e.g. would it be possible to catalog z3ext objects in Plone catalogs? - both Plone and z3ext have packages in common from at least the zope, zope.app, zopyx, zc and z3c namespaces. I see z3ext also includes some packages from the lovely namespace. Is it likely that they will share z3ext and plone packages as well in future? E.g. would it be possible to use z3ext.workflow in Plone? Googling showed at least one Plone buildout using z3ext.lucene - what are the main things that someone familiar with Plone should understand in order to understand how z3ext works, how it differs architecturally from Plone? What are each system's relative strengths and weaknesses? - how does the internationalization support of z3ext compare with that of Plone? - how does the security model compare? Regards, -- jean . .. .... //\\\oo///\\ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ Plone-developers mailing list [hidden email] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plone-developers |
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Martin Aspeli
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(This isn't the right list for this, by the way; it should go on plone-user)
Jean Jordaan wrote: > Recently we were searching for a way to get a community site setup > quickly. By this we mean a site where users can sign up and > participate in forums, upload documents and media, blog, write > comments on uploads, and publish some information about themselves. I don't think Plone is unsuitable for those requirements in general. You obviously need to do some feasibility analysis. All of those things can be achieved relatively easily in Plone with a sensible workflow/security model. > Though Plone has had a number of forum and blogging products, none of > them have caught on to a large extent. Plone itself is using Nabble to > provide forum services, and I've seen a number of statements that this > is not a focus for Plone. Plone uses Nabble because Plone uses mailing lists, not forums. It's true that this isn't a major focus, but that's a tautology more than anything. It's not a major focus until someone focuses on it, by writing and contributing code. That said, there's been a new release of Ploneboard this week. A major revamp of the discussion system in the form of plone.app.discussion narrowly missed inclusion in 4.0 and will hopefully appear in 4.1, but is usable as an add-in on the meantime. And you can also integrate Plone with am ore dedicated forum product. As for blogs (unless you really need pingbacks or whatever), uploading media and documents, and maintaining a profile, that's relatively standard functionality in Plone. I think you'd probably want to spend some time on the look and feel, though, since Plone has quite a "corporate", artefact-centric look and feel configuration out of the box. > Unfortunately, there isn't much documentation yet. Out of 150 z3ext > packages in our instance, there are 24 readme files, of which 4 are in > Russian. At this point, I'd probably stop and look elsewhere. :) Code without documentation is broken by definition (and yes, this includes bits of Plone). If you want something really simple focused on blogging and forums, why not use Drupal or phpBB something like that? > - what are the possibilities of accessing z3ext objects from Plone and > vice versa, if the same ZEO server serves both databases? I wouldn't do that if it were my production database, but in theory it shouldn't matter so long as they have the same module path (i.e. you have one giant eggs list that includes everything from both systems). The risk of clashes is relatively high there, though. > - e.g. would it be possible to catalog z3ext objects in Plone catalogs? I can't imagine that'd be anything other than a horrible hack. :) > - both Plone and z3ext have packages in common from at least the zope, > zope.app, zopyx, zc and z3c namespaces. I see z3ext also includes some > packages from the lovely namespace. Is it likely that they will share > z3ext and plone packages as well in future? E.g. would it be possible > to use z3ext.workflow in Plone? Googling showed at least one Plone > buildout using z3ext.lucene Code sharing is always good, and there's no general reason why there couldn't be some z3ext modules used in Plone. That largely depends on how re-usable they are, I suppose, and whether anyone tries to integrate them. To my knowledge, it's not been done in an open source fashion. > - what are the main things that someone familiar with Plone should > understand in order to understand how z3ext works, how it differs > architecturally from Plone? What are each system's relative strengths > and weaknesses? Can't help you there, sorry. > - how does the internationalization support of z3ext compare with that of Plone? Or here. > - how does the security model compare? Or here. Martin -- Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ Plone-developers mailing list [hidden email] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plone-developers |
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deanpowers
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