All, just thought I'd post a follow-up to my previous rants/deliberations regarding content objects and zpts. Thanks to Jochen and Paul pointing me in the direction of 'Folders', I now seem to have a rather easy to use, flexible and manageable site setup. I was sceptical about using Folders at first as I thought they'd: o confuse my users - "so the folders are the web pages??!!"; o clutter the ZMI - every content object appearing as a leaf in the left-hand tree; o be unwieldy to use within the ZMI due to them not having textareas for editing (without going into the 'Properties' tab). I think I still stand by these problems, but they are easily circumvented by using custom management screens to take out some of the more confusing aspects of the setup. This is what I've done.
From reading the blurb about 'Kubes', I think I've essentially implemented a poor-man's version. Instead of defining a new class in a product (non-standard products were not available to me for this project remember), I simply wrote custom management methods (as python scripts) that added/edited properties to allow me to distinguish between certain object types as I needed.
An unexpected added bonus was the easy way I can switch from content being just a text property (i.e. static html), to dynamically scripted using zpt/dtml/whatever. All I need to do is define a subobject on my folder (with the name I've chosen for content - 'content'). The index_html acquired from the site root simply inserts the rendered result of the context's 'content' attribute and all works nicely. The only thing I'm missing now is catalogawareness, although I suppose I could even hack that functionality into my customised edit methods. I'm a little leery of this approach as any time people use the ZMI (and some inevitably will at some stage), the catalog becomes out of sync. It just feels too hacky. Anyway, I'm off to install 'Kubes', figure out how to make them catalogaware, figure out if their content can be easily turned into scripts and double check that they solve the ZMI issues in this sort of setup. For now though, I'm a happy bunny. I've got a solution that I like where before, things were looking a little dicey. cheers, tim