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Hello, Timothy.

You could use ZTopics to provide each school with customized views
of content. However, that won't prevent them from seeing the other
school's topics. It wont look like a different portal to each school,
it'll just offer known locations for each school to look for stuff.

I see two options open to you. The best and easiest would be to
read and participate in the (overly frighteningly named) ReviewRevamp
Wiki:

http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/ZWiki/ReviewRevamp

Perhaps you don't want to manage a role for each school. (There's
no easy way to manage roles on members yet anyway.) In that case,
your best bet would be to extend the PortalCatalog to filter results
based on the user's school Here's how I'd do it.

o Add a property to the Member object which associates each Member
with a particular school or schools. This should be a string or a
sequence of strings.

o Add a property to your content which describes which schools the
content is relevant for. This should be a sequence of strings.

o Provide an interface to edit this, and make it available via
toolbox_actions.

o Add a KeywordIndex to the catalog. This should index the schools
property of your content objects.

o Extend the PortalCatalog searchResults method to insert a new key.
This is essentially all PortalCatalog does, so you can use it as a
straightforward model.

o Replace your portal's catalog with the new extended one.

I wonder if PortalCatalog shouldn't allow you to to customize the
filters it applies without having to extend the class. I'll probably
do this... eventually.

Good luck,
Mike.

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Timothy Wilson wrote:

> Hey everyone,
>
> Here's how I'm envisioning Topics working on my site. Please let me know if
> I'm way off base here.
>
> As I've described previously, the site I'm working on is for the school
> district where I teach. Like nearly all school districts we are a collection
> of individual buildings, departments, and classrooms.
>
> My goal is to create one central Web site for the entire school district
> that would be the place that first-time visitors and unauthenticated
> members see. Once a user authenticates or joins the site, they could
> customize the site for their particular needs. What's the single most
> important way of organizing? By school, of course. I want the site to be
> instantly filtered for a particular school when a student of staff member
> from that school logs in. That's the key to the whole thing as far as I'm
> concerned.
>
> No more individual sites for each school. (It just looks like
> it.) Information of interest to the entire district can be added to the site
> once and be made visible on all of the filtered school pages. I imagine
> having a topic for each building, department and classroom which would
> greatly facilitate the customized presentation of the site's content on a
> per-user basis.
>
> Am I in the ballpark here? (What's with the baseball metaphors?? :-) I don't
> really want to step up to the plate and strike out on this. (Couldn't
> resist.)
>
> -Tim
>
> --
> Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out:
> Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.k12.mn.us/ | http://www.zope.org/
> W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org/
> wilson@visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com/

--
Mike Pelletier email: mike@digicool.com
Mild mannered software developer icq: 7127228
by day, super villain by night. phone: 519-884-2434

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Mike Pelletier wrote:

> You could use ZTopics to provide each school with customized views
> of content. However, that won't prevent them from seeing the other
> school's topics. It wont look like a different portal to each school,
> it'll just offer known locations for each school to look for stuff.

That's OK. I don't have any reason to prevent people from seeing content
from the other schools. It just happens that nearly all user contributed
content will exist in the context of a classroom, department, or school.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, using ZTopics will at the very least help with
the sorting and searching. For example, a student at Foo Elementary should
see the lunch menu for Foo Elementary and not Spam Elementary. I like the
idea of confining ZCatalog searches to a particular topic.

> I see two options open to you. The best and easiest would be to
> read and participate in the (overly frighteningly named) ReviewRevamp
> Wiki:

Eeek! <breaks out in a cold sweat> I'll check it out. :-)

> Perhaps you don't want to manage a role for each school. (There's
> no easy way to manage roles on members yet anyway.) In that case,
> your best bet would be to extend the PortalCatalog to filter results
> based on the user's school Here's how I'd do it.
>
> o Add a property to the Member object which associates each Member
> with a particular school or schools. This should be a string or a
> sequence of strings.

That information is already contained in our NDS directory. Getting it out
of NDS is a whole 'nother can of worms. (Please excuse the U.S.ism)

> o Add a property to your content which describes which schools the
> content is relevant for. This should be a sequence of strings.

As far as user cutomization goes, my thinking was that each user should be
able to filter what types of content they'd like to see. A student at Foo
Elem. will see all of that news by default, but they might also like to see
sports news from the high school. A parent of students at Spam Elementary
and Bar High School might want to filter for those schools plus some other
set of news categories. I want every user to see district-wide news items
(with no option to exclude them).

Going further, student 'John Q. Doe' might be taking chemistry during a
particular hour with a particular teacher. I'm wondering if topics would be
a useful way to facilitate searching for information related to that
particular class. All of our student schedules and teaching assignments are
contained in an Oracle database that I hope to hook up to Zope so that Zope
can automatically determine who is enrolled in which classes. It will be
very cool if it works out.

I'll take a careful look at the rest of your suggestions. I hope this makes
some sense.

-Tim

--
Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out:
Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.k12.mn.us/ | http://www.zope.org/
W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org/
wilson@visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com/

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Timothy Wilson wrote:

> That's OK. I don't have any reason to prevent people from seeing content
> from the other schools. It just happens that nearly all user contributed
> content will exist in the context of a classroom, department, or school.
> Unless I'm misunderstanding, using ZTopics will at the very least help with
> the sorting and searching.

Think of ZTopics being to a ZCatalog what DMOZ or Yahoo is to the
Internet. Actually, they're quite simple to install and use, you
should just take a look.

> For example, a student at Foo Elementary should see the lunch menu
> for Foo Elementary and not Spam Elementary. I like the idea of
> confining ZCatalog searches to a particular topic.

You can't search 'within' a topic, but I can see how you might
improve ZTopic to support this. It wouldn't be difficult.

I like your ideas about filters, below. I can see how it would be
very useful for not only administrators, but individual members to be
able to apply global (to them) filters to the catalog. It would be an
easy feature to hack into a portal, a bit harder to add to the PTK in
a friendly and consistent fashion. But definately a desirable
feature! I'll ponder on it for a while.

Mike.

> As far as user cutomization goes, my thinking was that each user should be
> able to filter what types of content they'd like to see. A student at Foo
> Elem. will see all of that news by default, but they might also like to see
> sports news from the high school. A parent of students at Spam Elementary
> and Bar High School might want to filter for those schools plus some other
> set of news categories. I want every user to see district-wide news items
> (with no option to exclude them).
>
> Going further, student 'John Q. Doe' might be taking chemistry during a
> particular hour with a particular teacher. I'm wondering if topics would be
> a useful way to facilitate searching for information related to that
> particular class. All of our student schedules and teaching assignments are
> contained in an Oracle database that I hope to hook up to Zope so that Zope
> can automatically determine who is enrolled in which classes. It will be
> very cool if it works out.
>
> I'll take a careful look at the rest of your suggestions. I hope this makes
> some sense.
>
> -Tim
>
> --
> Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out:
> Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.k12.mn.us/ | http://www.zope.org/
> W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org/
> wilson@visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com/
>
>
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>
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>

--
Mike Pelletier email: mike@digicool.com
Mild mannered software developer icq: 7127228
by day, super villain by night. phone: 519-884-2434