On 1/8/06, David Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What is the best for merchants to manage the product list and content of > their site? I can certainly put in into an RDBMS, but what would be the > easiest way for them to manage their offering? Should I create a portal site > for them or should I allow them into the ZMI in some way? Based upon the > varied needs of the merchants, I would like to let them into the ZMI, and > see their products as instances under their site.
It's very easy to design multiple user interfaces in Zope 3 thanks to the skins system. You don't need to give them access to the ZMI. The ZMI in Zope 3 is just a default skin. It exposes a lot of things that are best used by those who understand Zope 3. You could fit custom product management screens into it, but in my experience it's better to build a custom interface. It's not that difficult to do. As far as managing the data in the RDBMS from Zope 3, you can always use SQL Methods / Scripts or just interact with the database adapters directly and do the SQL interaction that way. For a more object-oriented solution you can try using 'sqlos' (SQLObject Support) which integrates the Python SQLObject system with Zope 3. You can still use Zope 3's schema, widgets, and form system - even if you generate the SQL yourself. If you have a product schema like this: class IProductInfo(Interface): name = zope.schema.TextLine( title=u"Product Name", maxlength=255, required=True) price = zope.schema.Float(title=u"Product Cost", required=True) you can still use the form system to get those fields, validate the input against the schema, and if validation succeeds, you can generate SQL from the validated data instead of assigning it to a Python object. You can make a site for the merchants that is specific to their needs. It doesn't need to be the ZMI (it would be a lot of work to integrate into that), but it can be that kind system. All of the tools are there. For the amount of data that you're talking about, an RDBMS is probably better tuned to your requirements. But you can still take full advantage of Zope 3's features even if you're not using the ZODB as your primary storage. _______________________________________________ Zope3-users mailing list Zope3-users@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-users