I might be out of date, but I just discovered the set tag. http://www.zope.org/Members/Ivo/SetTag I'm not going to install it (cause I'm not alone on the server and I don't want to confuse my close zope friends), but I like it a lot. Maybe I should have cross posted this message to zope-dev?? The set tag is described at: http://www.zopelabs.com/cookbook/992331398 by ivo. Simplest case: # old situation <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('foo', 10*2)"> # new situation <dtml-set foo="10*2"> I know little about this product, but I like it because newbies will like it. It is very intuitive and makes a lot of DTML sense. So many of the Zope newbies are developers who come from Perl or ASP or whatever, and instead of forcing all the new stuff on them, we should invite them humbly by making them feel at home. Sucking up to newbies in a nutshell :) What does DC think about this? My vote is for including it in DTML in the near future after proper QA.