Sounds like you want membership and a requirement for authentication if you are to post.

The former can probably be "borrowed" from the CMF.

The latter can be done by reading here and making posting require authentication.

You could then munge the posting form so it uses the current logged in users id (and email address if you brought the membership tool from CMF too) instead of letting them be typed in.

In other news, I've been using Squishdot for about a month now and I think I'm really getting it figured out. My constructive criticism for Squishdot would be:

• Clean up the verbage. I've spent a great deal of time going through the various webpages getting rid of references to "ninji" and such.
• Make webpages modular. I went through and made one DTML method for titlebars and a header and footer that implement the main squishdot page. The result is that I can make new pages that are in a similar style to the front page in less than a minute (like this). And if the titlebar were the same DTML method everwhere it'd give users the option of changing it everywhere.
• I modified the posting pages so that you must preview once before posting. Works great and cuts down on crap posts.
• Don't embed strange "features" in Python. The fact that the leftbox is always changing drives me nuts, and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to dig it all out of the source code.
• It'd be nice if text URLs automatically got turned into links.
• It'd be cool if Squishdot came with a nice set of posting guidelines.

My only requests would be for a user system that more closely resembles that of Slashdot and a good polling system. With a good user system, user comments would moderate themselves (or users could edit their mistakes).

My only other question would be: How do I sort searches by date?

Finally, I appreciate all the hard work that has been put into this project. It's quite impressive and very well put together. The installation was the easiest thing I've been through and the customization has fairly intuitive.

For anyone that's curious, my site is CogNews.

• Comment Answers :-) by on Friday August 22, 03:41PM, 2003

  Hi there, Well, the DTML is Squishdot is dire, but I'm never going to have time to fix that, so apologies. When I use it, I start with the 'plain' site and build from there using ZPT and Python Scripts. Not sure what you mean about the leftbox, what's embedded in python? Yeah on the text URLs thing, patches greatfully accepted ;-) Likewise with the posting guidlines... The user system and polling are too big to bother doing for Squishdot, I'd love to do them for Swishdot, but time/funding for that hasn't been forthcoming in the last two years :-( For sorting searches by date, have a read about ZCatalog on zope.org. Squishdot _is_ a ZCatalog, but if you run in to trouble, I don't mind answering specific questions :-) Glad you're having fun with the Squish! Chris

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