Customizing Squishdot (Part 1) 
Zope Development 
Butch Landingin 
squishdot@yahoo.com 
1 
you-gotta-concentrate 
If you want more details on how to customize Squishdot then this is the article for you. 
 It talks about all the things you can do with Squishdot so that 1) it fits your news publishing 
 and discussion needs, and 2) it integrates seamlessly with the rest of your website. 
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There are several major areas of customization :  
<OL> 
<LI>The Add Squishdot Page and Options Tab 
<LI>The Topic Subjects Tab 
<LI>The Images and Topic Images Folder 
<LI>The Properties Tab 
<LI>The Configuration (Tiny) Tables and Related Folders 
<LI>The DTML Methods 
</OL> 
<P> 
Each one of these items will be discussed in turn, except the last item -- which has an entire 
 article devoted just to it. Also, the classes, variables and methods that you can use to access/control  
 Squishdot are also discussed in another article. 
<H3>The Add Squishdot Page and Options Tab </H3> 
<P> 
These pages are actually very similar, 
 the only difference being that the id/title fields being modifiable in the add page and 
 the options for the default web site setup does not show up in the options tab (i.e. it's only 
 applicable when you're adding the page). 
<P> 
Aside from the id/title fields (which are fairly self-explanatory), you can set 
 the following: 
<UL> 
<LI> Mail Host - setting this to an actual mailhost object will enable the option to notify 
 by email the article/comment poster when a reply was made to his posts.   
<LI> Moderation Options - there are three available choices : 
<UL> 
<LI> Posting both articles and comments are moderated -- this means that all postings 
 must be reviewed in the postings tab before they can seen by ordinary users. 
<LI> Only postings of articles are moderated -- unlike the option above, comments  
 to articles are not reviewed and are automatically available for viewing. 
<LI> No moderation -- this means both articles and their comments are automatically 
 available for viewing. 
</UL> 
<LI> Maximum posts - the number here refers to the maximum number of articles that 
 are displayed on the main page before they start being moved to the older articles 
 list. Based on this number, the minimum number of articles that are always displayed 
 on the main page (regardless of posting date) is computed as one-third (1/3) of this. 
<LI> Expiration options - these options control if and when articles expire (i.e. get deleted 
 from the database. Articles can either : 
<UL> 
<LI> Never expire - you have to manually delete each article if you want delete the older 
 articles 
<LI> Expire after a set number of days. You can set the number of days in the input box 
 for that option. This way, old articles (along with their comments) always get cleaned 
 up automatically. 
</UL> 
<LI> Default website setup (Add Page only) - these options control what the look and 
 feel of the website that gets automatically loaded when adding the Squishdot site. There 
 are three(3) options available: 
<UL> 
<LI> Plain vanilla web pages - this has the minimal set of features needed to  
 establish a news publishing/discussion site. Use this if you want a very simple 
 interface or plan to design your own look and feel. This option will not load any 
 images, topics, or articles like this one you are currently reading. 
<LI> Fancy demo with a slashdot-like theme - this gives you the same color scheme and 
 look and feel of the Slashdot site. This is just to give ideas on how to implement 
 features on that site. You can select this option even without the TinyTable product 
 but it will not give you the same ease of configuration than if you did have it. 
<LI> Fancy demo with a 'blue heaven' theme - this is like the Fancy demo above, except 
 it has a different color scheme and some of the options are set differently. Both of 
 them have the same navigational scheme and features (including the preloaded messages, 
 subject topics, etc.) 
</UL> 
</UL> 
<P> 
The next parts will discuss the rest of the topics. 
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