Summary

Using Zope's powerful object database and user-friendly data publishing capabilities, Digital Creations helped the Free Lance-Star bring their database of 5,000 business listings online.

Case Facts

The Free Lance-Star (http://www.flstarweb.com/) is a daily newspaper that recently won its eleventh consecutive journalism award from the State of Virginia. They wanted to create a searchable website of their advertisers' business listings. They manage an internal database of business listings for their circulation area using Lotus Approach, a Windows-based database program.

They wanted the website to work with their existing database and business practices. For example, web searches should returns results in a way which reflects the status of the advertiser. Advertisers with high upsell levels should be treated preferentially by the search engine, for example, by graphically enhancing their search results.

In addition, searching the website needed to be fast and offer sophisticated options.

Problem

The newspaper staff wanted a fairly hands-off approach that allowed uploading desktop data files. Searches needed to be very fast. Finally, the staff needed to quickly recover from mistakes, such as uploading the wrong data.

Solution

Digital Creations created a Zope-based solution that provides all the ingredients necessary to manage a compelling business directory.

Using the powerful Z Tables package for high-performance data management in Zope, the Digital Creations staff quickly built the searching component of the website. Z Tables reads the existing business database, and imports the data into the website. Using the powerful indexing capabilities in Z Tables, the Digital Creations staff created the infrastructure needed to ensure fast searches. Each time the Free Lance-Star uploads new data, the indices are updated automatically. If they make a mistake and upload the wrong data, they can use the undo facility to safely recover both the data and the index.

Zope's object model provides the flexibility to display search results according to their business rules. For example, each upsell level became a separate document that allows easy formatting of value-add customer results.

Once the website was built, the Free Lance-Star easily uses Zope's through-the-web management facilities to maintain the website and modify the look and feel of the site, such as adding new logo images for upsell customers or changing the format of search results..