Honest-to-god Unix with a good UI. What's not to like?

2:05:39 PM    comments ()  trackback []  

The Zope Management System sort of petered out a bit, at least it did in my mind. The way I was doing things behind the scenes was starting to run into some difficulties that I couldn't solve (like what to do when a Zope item has a period in its name? That screws with the way that XML-RPC integration was done with Zope). Now I'm wondering about how to fit OPML into the equation.

If there was a simple Zope method that rendered the current directory as OPML, you would be more than half of the way there. Put it in the root directory, and let acquisition take care of the rest. Making individual items editable would be a little bit more of a challenge, but it would be doable. The hard part would be creating new items. Perhaps that could be deferred to the standard web-based management interface.

One of the key thoughts I've been trying to remember is that OPML doesn't have to represent physical structure, it can represent logical structure. Sounds obvious, but it's a hard thought to hold on to. I keep having to remind myself about that.

I've also wondered about how it could be folded into the Python tool. It would be interesting to have Python outlines shared between people / workgroups. It could be a remote collaboration or distribution tool.

Also, since this is all leveraged off of nodeTypes, I'm pondering how unrecognized nodeTypes could be dealt with. We need some method of discovering handlers for unknown nodeTypes, and optionally automatically installing them.

It just goes on and on and on.

BTW, a while back I wrote some Python code that renders OPML into HTML in the same manner that the Pike Renderer does (correctly processing <rules> and the like). I could make it available if there's interest. I was going to use it in a Zope product but never got around to it.

11:36:02 AM    comments ()  trackback []