An Archetype field that manages attachments
===========================================

This product replaces the former ZAttachmentAttribute from Ingeniweb (see
ingeniweb.sourceforge.net).

DEPENDENCIES
------------

  * Plone 2.0+

  * Archetypes 1.3+

  Plugins

    * xpdf >= 3.0

    * wvware >= 1.0

    * xlhtml

    * ppthtml

The improvements / regressions of AF over ZAA are:
--------------------------------------------------

  * AF uses Archetypes' Field design to work. It's, then, Archetypes-dependent.

  * ZAAPlugins is no longer necessary. All AF plugins are integrated directly
    into the AF product.

  * AF offers a convenient plugin structure, allowing you to create plugins
    with only 10 lines of code. Doing so, we've lost a little bit of the
    flexibility we never needed ;)
    However it's still possible to override the AttachmentHandler class to offer
    more flexibility (AttachmentHandler is the new name for AbstractAttachment).

  * A plugin is now a singleton providing indexing & preview & iconing
    services. No more polymorphism as in ZAA (in ZAA, each and every attachement
    stored an instance of a plugin class, which turned out to be too complicated
    for the actual need).

  * A side effect of the preceding point is that you can upload invalid files
    to your server and develop (or configure) new plugins AFTER you've uploaded
    'em. AF will dynamically detect the new content type and will provide
    preview and indexing support magically. With that feature, customers can
    start populating a website very early in the process!

  * AF doesn't support images in MSWord preview yet (it will !)

  * AF doesnt' store attachments preview nor searchable text in ZODB; they
    are cached though, and will normally be calculated only once per Zope
    program run. This may be configurable in the future (ie. you can choose best
    speed or less disk usage).

How to test it ?
----------------

  use testrunner -qad .

