For the database thing, you might be better off looking into Zope groups. There will be better information for your query there. This is about the best advice I can give for looking into db access as it is really more driven by the Zope layer. Below is my experience with a short project that did use SQL access.
I think the situation has improved recently, but about a year ago I was putting together a Plone based application that really needed relational style data. Plone/Zope use an object database by default, but the nature of the data outside certain group, user and personalization was much more suited to relational databases. The solution was to simply use python database drivers and manage the SQL data querying etc myself - yet still use the ZODB for managing users, groups, etc. At the time there were products for Zope available that would help replace ZODB in it's entirety with a SQL database - but I didn't really play with them much. This odd architecture with 2 data-sources really wasn't as hard to maintain as it seemed as there was a clear encapsulation of the functionality that required SQL access, versus ZODB access. A quick summary of my experiences with this type of problem: 1) Database drivers for python exist to facilitate using relational databases 2) I believe (don't know) that the state of option for using relations db's instead of ZODB has improved 3) Your still going to be basically on your own for writing the data access layer for items that do not neatly fit into the archetypes model. And FYI- the app I did this in, never went into production - for business rather than technical reasons. But it does mean I'm not sure how well that architecture would actually perform and scale in the real world. _______________________________________________ Setup mailing list [email protected] http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/setup
