Well, I'm actually using Bobo right now, but this should be applicable to ZPublisher (here's a question: I understand that bobo users encouraged to switch to ZPublisher... are there any "issues" to be aware of? Is there a document that describes how one might make such a switch as painless as possible?). Anyway, I've been messing around with Bobo for a while now, and have a few questions: I have a few email forms that I want a method to pretty up and send to the appropriate person. Here's how I'm doing it now, but I know there's a Right Way that involves dtml and all that. I await enlightenment, RTFM, etc. Unfortunately, I didn't know about REQUEST at the time (and still can't find any real clear documentation on it...), and so I had to code up my own little publisher that just calls a python object with a dictionary of the form values. I have two methods, d_echo() and d_mail() which are called with a function and a dictionary. They both call the underlying form method which just prettifies the dictionary data (takes a dictionary and returns a string). So I can write: <form action=/cgi-bin/d_echo/mail_forms/mr_form> and d_echo() will call mail_forms.mr_form(dict) and return whatever it returns. Similarly, /cgi-bin/d_mail/mail_forms/mr_form will return "mailed!" and mail whatever mail_forms.mr_form(dict) returns. Ok, now that's ugly enough. Now we get to the prettification methods: My current approach is to say: def mr_form(a): msg = untab("""\ %(name)s %(email)s %(comments)s """) return msg % MsgDict(a) Where MsgDict wraps a dictionary except returns "fieldname: value" when it finds the value and "fieldname: (not given)" when it doesn't. Now this doesn't work when things get marginally more complicated, so if I want an address printed out right, and not like address: 123 road city: centerville (a great place to raise your kids up) state: etc. I did this: def mr_form(a): msg = untab("""\ %(name)s Address: %(adress)s %(city)s, %(state)s %(zip code)s """) dict = {} for i in "address", "city", "state", "zip code", "country": if dict.has_key(i): dict[i] = dict[i] else: dict[i] = "(no %s given)" % i return format(msg % UnionDict(dict, MsgDict(a))) which is worse yet, but works. UnionDict overlays dictionaries by looking in each one successively, and format() breaks lines over 70 columns. Ok, so what's the right way to do this? I may seem stupid for recreating all sorts of functionality that may already exist in dtml, but I read and read and read the docs and source-code (even the howto on zope.org for "Creating a Mail Form", but it assumed I was using full-fledged zope, which I'm not (I'm just the cgi programmer, I can't switch the whole site to zope even if I'd like to)). I imagine there are a lot of people in my situation who aren't designing a brand new site from scratch but would still like to use ZPublisher/ZTemplate without all the other stuff. I think it would be useful to have a clearly marked portion of the docs that say "These pertain to ZP/ZT-only sites." The stuff in "Zope Developer Information" (basically the old bobo docs) would be good there, perhaps with less scary names. Here's another question: I know dtml supports both ssi-like and python string-like syntax, but everyone seems to use the ssi-like. I prefer python syntax since it looks less cluttered to me (and I think it's a good thing that my dtmls don't resemble ssi)... is there any particular reason to use one over the other, or is it purely personal preference? One of the things Bobo/ZPublisher touts is the ease of using things like pcgi, fcgi, etc. I've been using fcgi, but I wasn't able to find a cgi-template style script for it, so I wrote my own. Granted, it was trivial (provided I did it right), but it would still be nice if it was included, or the documentation said where I could download it. thanks!