At 06:29 PM 4/20/2002 -0400, Nicholas Riley wrote:
> > ... So, in effect, it's more like SSI than like
> > Frontier's template insertion.
>
>Zope has a new templating language, ZPT, which is extremely neat
>looking, because you can edit a page from a WYSIWYG editor. All of the
>inserted code goes into tag attributes.

Sam Reynolds says:
>ZPT is just another new language to learn.
>It perpetuates the unfortunate approach of requiring
>a writer (content developer) to put non-content stuff
>into the content.

also:
>I like Zope. But it does the templates inside-out.
>
>In Zope, you have to put formatting blocks in every
>content page. It's a big improvement over having to
>maintain the entire final HTML in each page, but it's
>still unfriendly to non-techies. (And this techie
>doesn't care for it, either!)

I've spent some fairly considerable time trying to work with Zope and this
was a frustrating feature to me too.

ZPT doesn't fix this either. In fact, you could argue that it makes it
worse, because a non-techie could (more) easily remove an element without
realizing its significance.

The Zope CMF (content management framework) addresses this problem. The
template is more truly a template in the Frontier sense and the content is
abstracted from the presentation much more. It is somewhat like manila in
conception (I emphasize "somewhat"), but I was never able to get it working
properly.

My experience is still fairly limited, but the CMF has had dependencies and
version requirements that are a little tricky to sort out. One of the
things I was warned about when starting to experiment with Zope was that
breakage with upgrades was not uncommon and this has proven to be the case.

I'd also say that moving from a base CMF to a production version would not
be for the faint-hearted. You'd really need to understand the
core. Documentation is more along the lines of "read the code".

In short, it didn't turn out to be the panacea I was hoping for (nothing
ever is).

David
--
David Carter-Tod
<wccartd@wc.cc.va.us>

Instructional Technologist/Distance Education Contact
Wytheville Community College, 1000 E. Main St.,
Wytheville, VA 24382
(wk) 276-223-4784
http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/

Online certificate in web site design:
http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/websiteDesign

Enclosures

None.  

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