hi all, i've been (and am) trying to convince people here of the zope way for some time (vs. iis / frontpage or dreamweaver). people here publish their data with frontpage or dreamweaver and some kind of template system for the layout, or (print-only) they use an old, proprietary system which i have the honour of exporting the data out of (into oracle which zope (and other systems) read from). i was successfull mostly if the area/data concerned was rather structured (eg. newspaper system, data always with title / lead / fulltext / author etc.). the argumentation mainly is something like '(more or less rigid) structure vs. freeform', 'structure' being zope, 'freeform' being dreamweaver/classical fs-based webserver. i think it's easy to find arguments for structured publishing if the data you deal with has some inherent structure -- * content/code separation * able to (manually) search on specific fields * automated search, making possible other link structures than the tree structure of the fs approach * able to change layout simply, personalisation of layout and more i guess. there's two things i think would be good to accomplish -- * making publishing of structured data as simple and fast as possible * developing more generic structures to match the data that is not-that-structured. or so i think. the "why-cut-n-past" problem below would fall into the first category i guess. my users cut-n-paste (no complaints so far). but i think it should also work if you managed to get data into *some* structure, eg. my dumb-ass approach would be to let the editors put their titles between <h1> ... </h1>, lead be <h2> .. </h2>, author a different text color, body jsut plain text, anything. just so they then can upload the document and that document gets parsed so it can be read / edited / searched / etc. later on. tell me what you think of this. ow, that mozilla build has finished _finally_. gotta play with m13 (alpha!) now :) peter. kedai@kedai.com.my wrote: hi all, firstly, it's not me asking that question. it's the users. here's the situation.: we have developed a ZClass that caters for the publishing/serving of news items. we already have contents done in quark, pagemaker and other formats. users (editorial) currently cut and paste from the source. when the users saw that they have to cut and paste, they asked why? and they pointed to frontpage, pagemill, etc as a solution. now, we don't want that, but how can we explain the benefit of zope over the others. i have read the zope against cf, vignette thread, but that's too high level for the users to grasp, me think. so, really, what's the benefit of using zope instead of the others; esp for the non-techies. p/s - maybe it's our failure in providing a better solution in exporting contents from window$ apps that cause this question. help, pointers, docs, welcomed. -- ------------------------------------------------------ http://www.kedai.com.my/kk Am I Evil? -- _________________________________________________ peter sabaini, mailto: sabaini@niil.at -------------------------------------------------