Hey, Duncan: About the latest Jon Udell article
(http://www.byte.com/column/BYT20010524S0003),

on 5/29/01 1:52 PM, Duncan at duncan@smeed.org wrote:

> Ref: http://www.smeed.org/1281
>
> It's interesting to note that the bullet points earlier on in that page that
> highlight features he cites as vital components of a project weblog are
> basically features that Conversant (http://www.free-conversant.com/) already
> has.

I'd be interested to hear how it is that Conversant supports his bullet
point #3/5, which is "Categorized Items."

I ask because one of the major reasons I'm focusing my development efforts
on Zope right now instead of Conversant is that Zope seems more flexible in
terms of this (essential, for me) capacity to add additional attributes to
entities in the object database -- logically implemented as columns.

The only way I could figure out how to do this in Manila (different product,
I know, but Frontier under the hood all the same) was using this "MetaData
plug-in" product (http://zelotes.ent.iastate.edu/metadata/) by John VanDyk.

It is interesting: Having just visited the aforereferenced page to get the
correct URL, I note that JVD made the following weblog entry earlier this
month: "As you may have noticed, development of the Metadata Plugin is
slowing as I focus more time on Zope. Zope offers similar features in its
ZCatalog and provides mature connectors for relational databases."

This last point pretty much sums it up for me. Well, OK, the connectors
(like everything else in the Zope world) still have a bit of maturing to do.
Right now I'm spending too much time on a project that involves integrating
Zope with an enterprise Oracle database -- but at least I know the project
is feasible in Zope on something like a reasonable budget and timeline. If
there are useable RDBMS connectors available for either Manila OR
Conversant, then I (and maybe JVD and others) would like to know about it.

Anyway, I digress: my question is, does Conversant have some way of
supporting "Categorized Items" that I don't know about? Would it be via the
aforecaptioned MetaData plug-in, perhaps?


|/|/alt
Walter Ludwick
wludwick@mail.walmar.com