Been thinking (yes, it's a first!) about the CMS requirements. We have already discussed the features we need. Now let's look at what the CMS has to achieve.
WE will have to be able to do each of the tasks listed under with whatever CMS we put up on the site: 1. Customise each and every page. The CMS must be able to handle forms, file upload fields, simple HTML, structured text (if possible), plain text, XML, easy hyperlinks. 2. Define customised CGI-type scripts that can be run when a form is submitted or a file is uploaded. I'm a Perl-type person, so I'd prefer the possibility of having back-end Perl scripts that take form input, process it and dump it into the CMS. 3. Allow easy editing of any page with ACL control. 4. Permit user-defined search criteria on user-defined document criteria (e.g. search all HTML documents by class and subject and search string, or search all text documents by school name, etc). 5. Permit administrator-defined actions on new member, change member information, remove member, etc. 6. Have a hierarchical site where each member can customise his/her own area. 7. Have hierarchical membership (members and groups). 8. Have online help that can be customised. These are some of the things we need in our CMS as of yesterday. Now the dirty part... It's not enough to know that a CMS -can- do all these things. Until and unless we are -able- to do these things we will not make any progress. This is my primary issue with Plone. Plone probably has all these features. However, unless someone can come up and say, `OK, I know how to do all these things in Plone and I'll do them for you if necessary' my personal opinion is that Plone isn't the right platform for us. Good news and bad news: Sunil Abraham (the author of Plone) has been in touch and I've figured out (a) how to make Zope/Plone faster and (b) how to customise the logo. The bad news is that (a) the site still doesn't work and (b) I still don't know how to do any of the other things I listed above. I'm CC'ing Sunil this mail for information. Regards, -- Raju -- Raju Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/ It is the mind that moves
