Archetypes

Archetypes is a framework designed to ease the building of applications for Plone and CMF. Its main goal is to provide a standardized way to build content objects based on schema definitions. NOTE: This is installed by default in all modern Plone versions, don't download/install this unless you know that it's the right thing to do.

Project Description

Sidnei da Silva on ZopeMag:

What is Archetypes?

Archetypes (formerly known as CMFTypes) is a framework designed to facilitate the building of applications for Plone and CMF. Its main purpose is to provide a common method for building content objects, based on schema definitions. Fields can be grouped for editing, making it very simple to create wizard-like forms.

Motivation

Why does one need a special application for generating content objects? Since CMF is a very powerful framework for creating content management systems, like many other frameworks it puts a considerable load on the developer to satisfy its interfaces and implement all the things needed to make a system interface with it. Frameworks by definition are generic, which has the downside of often being too generic to be usable out-of-the-box by the average developer.

Archetypes aims to help the developer by lowering the bar just enough to make it reachable by the developer who knows what he wants but can't put in the time to learn all the requirements for creating content objects with CMF.

What does Archetypes offer you?

Archetypes is able to do all the heavy lifting needed to bootstrap a content type, allowing the developer to focus on other things such as business rules, planning, scaling and designing. It provides the following features:

• Auto-generation of editing and presentation views
• Registration of content types with the CMF tools
• Easy installation of the generated content objects
• Configurability of CMF actions
• Basic storage transparency
• Unique IDs
• References
• Basic security bootstrap