Forms / structured data feature in Plone 4

We are trying to make a document-managemnet / knowledge management portal using Plone 4. We would like a forms / structured data feature in our webapp with posibility of defining forms through the web, having workflows using these forms and being able to create reports from them (preferably in some format that facilitates simple and nice looking or skinnable printouts).

Any pointers to modules, documenta开发者_开发知识库tion and/or literature would be great. Thanks.

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Dexterity in combination with collections for reporting should get you what you need.

http://plone.org/products/dexterity

PloneFormGen is a good solution for through the web creation of standalone forms but as soon as you need your form to be workflowed, reviewed inside plone or later edited and updated then a "Content Type" is normally the most appropriate way to model this inside an CMS. Dexterity is the recommended way to build content types going forward. It has the ability to create and edit content types through the web.

For more indepth information of developing a Dexterity based solution see http://plone.org/products/dexterity/documentation/manual/developer-manual

Archetypes would be an alternative way to create content types.

Collections can be used for basic through the web reports. To make this work on the new fields in your content types you'd need to make the fields usable inside collections which I'll leave out of this explanation. For more advanced reports I'd suggest a simple BrowserView which lets you use any python you want to compose your report.

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The add-on http://plone.org/products/uwosh.pfg.d2c product with PloneFormGen, is going to be the best fit for your situation.

uwosh.pfg.d2c creates content objects from your PloneFormGen form submissions. You can then use it with placeful workflows to give you a custom workflow on the submission.

If you'd rather not use placeful workflows, it also allows you to specify the content type it'll save the form to so you can have a different content type, with a different workflow on every form.

Dexterity would work too, but the TTW tool is not nearly where PloneFormGen is.

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Simply: http://plone.org/products/ploneformgen