CMF - Content Management Framework (2.1.1)

What is the CMF?

The Zope Content Management Framework provides a set of services and content objects useful for building highly dynamic, content-oriented portal sites. As packaged, the CMF generates a site much like the Zope.org site. The CMF is intended to be easily customizable, in terms of both the types of content used and the policies and services it provides.

One of the most important extensions to Zope, providing a high-level content management architecture. The Content Management Framework (CMF) delivers a powerful, tailored CMS in a fraction of the time of big vendors.

The CMF is a great foundation for starting your portal. It anticipates particular needs but respects diversity. This means that the CMF will includes several simple applications and workflows but you will be able to selectively take components out and replace them with your own. A theme that you’ll hear over and over again in this book is how using the Zope and in this case CMF infrastructure you can save yourself a lot of time.

For example built into the CMF are things such as “Topics” which allow members to create custom views of data in the CMF such as “all Press Releeases about Achievers International within the last two weeks” and keep track of topics which interest them when they log into their portal workspace. Additionally, members can use features similar to a bookmark in a browser to quickly jump to resources they find particularly useful within the portal via a feature called “Favorites”.

The official website for developers interested in or working with the Content Management Framework. It uses the latest version of the CMF software and like Zope.org allows users to join and upload their own files such as “skins” which they may want to contribute to the community. Users can also create custom views to data available on the portal including “Topics” as well as links called “Favorites” which allow the user to quickly jump to their favorite sections or pages on the Portal.

Resources

General

• The mailing list, zope-cmf@zope.org. List information and online signup are available at: http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-cmf. Archives of the list are at: http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf.
• The docs/ directory contains user-oriented documentation
• Information about future developments can be found on the Roadmap

Developer

• The CMFDefault package is an example application, built using the API and services defined in CMFCore. You will probably want to alter it. In the first instance, refer to the source of CMFDefault for usage examples, standard idioms, etc.
• The API is documented in the interfaces/ directory of each package.
• Refer to the unit tests in the tests/ directory of each package for usage examples.