Coffee, Conversation And ZUBB - On The Board (
Page 2 of 6 )
First of all, what the heck is ZUBB?
In the words of its author, ZUBB, or the Zope Ultimate Bulletin Board, is "...a
threaded discussion board based on ZDiscussion and UBB (Ultimate Bulletin Board)."
It provides a simple, user-friendly discussion board for portal members, and includes
support for features like message posting and replying, message threading, and
subject/body search.
In order to get started with ZUBB, you'll need a working Zope installation (I'm
currently running Zope 2.5.0) and a copy of the latest release (currently version
0.7.1) of the package; you can download a copy from
http://www.zope.org/Members/BwanaZulia/ZUBB/
Installation is simply a matter of copying the package files to the appropriate
location, and importing the ZUBB package into Zope. Copy the source archive to
your Zope installation's root directory and unzip/untar it. You will see that
this archive contains the following files:
__init__.py
__init__.pyc
README.txt
ZDiscussions.py
ZDiscussions2.py
ZDiscussions.zexp
Of these, the first five files should get installed to the <Zope>/lib/python/Products/ZDBase/
directory, while the last should get installed to the <Zope>/import/ directory.
Once that's done, restart Zope and go to the Product Management section of the
Zope Control Panel. You should see ZDBase in the list of installed Products.
You now need to import the "ZDiscussions.zexp" package into Zope. Hit the Import
button on the Product Management screen, and enter the filename "ZDiscussions.zexp"
in the "Import filename" field of the resulting form.
Zope should now import the package and return you to the main Product Management
screen.
Make sure that the file is in the <Zope>/import directory of your Zope installation
before performing the step above.
Once the package has been successfully imported, it will show up in the list
of installed Products in the Zope management interface.
You can now begin using ZDiscussions on your site. {mospagebreak title=Putting
The Pieces Together} Once you've got ZUBB installed, you can use it by creating
an instance of the ZDiscussions Topic object in the appropriate location in your
Zope site.
Remember to give this topic an ID and a title; this will be used as the subject
for the topic thread, and you will not be able to change it later. In this case,
I'll assume that the topic is "PHP versus Zope"
Once the topic has been added, click into it and use the "Regenerate Methods"
function (at the top right corner of the page) to create all the required DTML
methods for the discussion board.
Finally, view the board, either via the management interface's "View" function
or by accessing the discussion board's URL in the browser, and you should see
something like this:
