I want to develop a few forms to gather info online from members.  For 
example information about new prospective members.

I'm hoping to use Archetypes to create a new type called 
prospectivemember to capture this info.  And, I'm hoping Archetypes 
will automatically generate forms for adding and editing such a type.  
Is this correct?  Is this a good way of going about this?  I've never 
used Archetypes or forms before.

Thanks,

David

==============================
David Diskin, david.diskin(at)verizon.net

Check out CMFMember, there's info to get you started here:

  <http://plone.org/newsitems/cmfmember-1.0-beta>

It looks like it marries the standard portal_memberdata tools/types with 
Archetypes so that you can add attributes to members and create workflows, 
say for qualifying them for more access, etc. ...s.

David Diskin wrote:[...]
[...]

Thanks, Scott.  This may be just what I'm looking for in this special  
case.  However,  i have many more forms that I'll need to create to  
gather other type of information and so, new content types.   So, do  
you and others think Archetypes is a good general solution?  Thanks,

David

On Nov 30, 2004, at 2:36 PM, Scott Burns wrote:
[...][...][...]
==============================
David Diskin, david.diskin(at)verizon.net

On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 02:36:58PM -0500, Scott Burns wrote:[...]

CMFMember does give you the ability to merge the good parts of Archetypes
with memberships. This lets you have new fields for members, aut-generated
forms, etc., plus members can undergo workflow (very useful for things like
paid-membership sites, so members can expire, be renewed, etc.)

However, it comes at a price--it's tinkering with some deep stuff in the
innards of Plone, and isn't (yet) well documented. My general recommendation
is to learn and use CMFMember if (and only if) you *need* to have this data
about members *and* you need some kind of workflow for members.

If you just want to have something like, say, a survey for members, where
you're gather data from your membership, but it's not informations that's
neccessarily intrinsic to membership, I'd just create an AT class for that,
and have everyone add one to respond to the survey.

In the future, I expect CMFMember to become so stable and documented that
it's the standard way membership is done. But until then, use it when you
need it, but don't reach for it if a simpler thing will do.

Best, 

- j.