[CPS-users] Adding contacts database

[Lennart Regebro]

On 1/12/07, Mário Valente <mvalente at itij.mj.pt> wrote:
>   Right. Why should I need an aditional piece of software to
>  manage?

Well, if you want to store it in an SQL database, then you need an SQL
database to store it in.

> >It depends on what you want to do with the data. Since it is contact data, I would go for a >CPSDirectory of some sort. Making a script that takes CSV data and creates entries in a ZODB base >CPSDirectory shouldn't be much work.
> >
>
>   What happens with the next table of stuff? Should a
>  programmer be needed to do this kind of basic stuff?

It is "basic" in the sense that it's simple to do, but at the same
time is very non-basic, as it's quite unusual. After five years in the
CMS world this is the first case I've seen of somebody wanting to
import an excel sheet of contacts. Any CMS needs programmers to modify
and adapt them to the customers needs, as CMS by it's nature is
something so customer specific that it can never be made completely
generic. Has we been talking about a CRM, then I would agree that
importing contacts would be a basic requirement. But we don't, we talk
about CPS, which doesn't even include a contact database by default,
and therefore you don't even have a natural place to import it.

What could be a neat thing to have would be a CSV to object importer,
that allows you to map the columns in a CSV file to the fields in a
type and then import it into a workspace or a directory, creating the
necssary objects. But that's a pretty serious amount of work to make a
nice and generic thing like that, and since writing a specific
importer script is so easy, I guess nobody has been bothered to do it.

>   I'm trying to resist the RoR pull.. but with the Zope
>  "complicate as much as possible strategy"

Well, if what you want is a HTML interface to a bunch of SQL tables, I
don't think you should resist it. If you want a CMS, then you should
resist it. CPS and RoR don't compete with each other. They are quite
different technologies solving what is essentially very different
problems.

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, CPS, Plone.
+33 661 58 14 64