Extensibility

When a technology has future expansion capabilities designed into it, it is considered extensible. Zope and CompoundDoc are highly extensible. To extend Zope all that is necessary is to extend the branches on the hierarchical database tree structure. In fact, Zope was created to ease the work involved in managing very large websites.

Extending CompoundDoc can be done in several ways. More items can be added so the same CompoundDoc can display more content. For instance, a product catalog might begin its life showing only one image of the product. Then at a later time another image item could be add to its CompoundDoc. Those older products in the catalog could then have another image added and new products could have two images when created. Adding new programming to increase its functionality can also extend CompoundDoc. Then old uses of that CompoundDoc would inherit the new functionality. Finally, an entirely new CompoundDoc could be written so the contents inside older CompoundDocs could be transferred to the new version.

All these techniques allow CompoundDoc to grow to meet future requirements. It is specifically designed to do just that.