Squishdot is a news publishing and discussion product for Zope. It creates a place in your website where people can post short articles, news items, announcements, etc. as well as hold threaded discussions about them. In other words, Squishdot is a weblog product.

Squishdot Features

Squishdot is a Zope Product, i.e. it works as a plug-in module for the Zope Application Server. It provides you with a news publishing and discussion site with a minimal amount of configuration and day-to-day administration. It is also easy to customize and can satisfy a wide range of news publishing needs.

Like Zope, it is being released under an OpenSource license. You can use, modify, and redistribute the source code for both commercial and non-commercial purposes following the terms imposed by the license.

Squishdot was inspired by Slashdot, a news publishing and discussion website (i.e. a weblog website) focusing on technology and the open source movement. While I credit Slashdot with many of the ideas I have used (e.g. navigational structure, mode of interaction, look-and-feel), I must make it clear that Slashdot is NOT in any way affiliated with, nor does it endorse or support Squishdot. DO NOT request any support or submit bugs, enhancement requests, questions etc. to Slashdot regarding Squishdot. Instead, send all email regarding Squishdot to [email protected].

I have used the look and feel of Slashdot to serve as a starting point, a showcase, of what can be done with Squishdot. As I get more suggestions and ideas for improving the application, I hope to develop its own look and feel and make it more effective in its goal of disseminating information and fostering discussion.

In terms of the actual source code, Squishdot has been derived from Confera, a threaded discussion Zope Product and it retains or extends many of the features included in Confera. These include :

• moderation options : both articles and comments moderated; only articles moderated, or no moderation at all
• search by author, topic, title or words in the article/comment body
• automatic article expiration (articles automatically deleted X amount of days after posting)
• attach files to articles and comments.

In addition, several features have been added:

• subject topics -- you can create subject categories to group together related articles
• subject topic images -- you can optionally associate subject topics to images
• additional fields have also been added : a department field and a summary text field
• preview postings button/panel ^*
• RSS/RDF channel page included (for content syndication) ^*
  If you wish to find out more about RDF/RSS and content syndication, visit the My Netscape Network page.

^* New for version 0.3.0

IMPORTANT NOTICE: SQUISHDOT Version 0.3.0 will not work with Zope version 1.x.x -- it will work only with Zope 2.0.x and higher.