CMFTools

In CMF, business logic and services are provided by one or more CMFTools.

These are Disk-based products that provide services for use by ContentTypes, or by other CMFTools, or by templates.

CMFTools do not contain content, and only the SkinsTool? is concerned with presentation.

In a CMF site, whether it is CMFDefault, Plone, CPS etc., a Tool is a singleton: that is, there is exactly one instance of each kind of Tool, contained in the root of the CMF site.

CMFDefault and CMFCore provide a number of tools. Plone and CPS inherit these tools, and also provide many of their own. More tools can be downloaded from third parties such as the Collective project. And you can of course write your own - it's not that hard. CMFBoringTool might be a useful example.

The CMFCore / CMFDefault tools include:

• ActionsTool? - provides context-appropriate actions the user can take, for use in the skins.
• CatalogTool? - provides search capabilities using ZCatalog?.
• DiscussionTool? - provides services allowing content-types to be discussable, a la web forums or blogs.
• MembershipTool?
• MemberDataTool?
• MetadataTool?
• PropertiesTool? - global configuration of the CMF site.
• RegistrationTool? - provides support for users to register as members.
• SkinsTool? - a container for templates, scripts, and images; also a registry that maps skin names to its subfolders. The SkinsTool? thus creates the look and feel for the site, allows multiple skins to be used. The scripts and templates typically include glue code for integrating the other CMFTools and the ContentTypes.
• SyndicationTool? -
• TypesTool? - a registry of ContentTypes.
• URLTool? - provides methods for getting the URL of the CMF site or content objects contained within it.
• WorkflowTool? - contains workflows such as DCWorkflow.

XXX FIXME - description of the remaining tools needed