From: John Goerzen [mailto:jgoerzen@complete.org]
Well, I've been working with it for some time and am still confused as to how to do simple things like set variables properly, cast data types (ie, string to a date, etc.), and why variables sometimes disappear. Also the syntax is a little strange (I can't figure out how to embed a quation mark inside a string passed to a function in dtml-call), so the learning curve is not exactly great, but otherwise, I really like it. The documentation is rather sparse, which hurts more than it otherwise would. Perhaps if I knew Python, it would be a bit better?
The Python tutorial may help with things like embedding quotes and "casting" (Python is dynamically typed: casting is a foreign concept). http://www.python.org/doc setting variables in Zope more like lisp than python or perl quickly: <dtml-let var1=expr1 var2=expr2> <dtml-var var1 fmt="date" ...> <dtml-var var2 ...> </dtml-let> or <dtml-with some-complicated-expression> use the generated namespace </dtml-with> I have found http://www.zope.org:18200/Members/Cyberrunner/QuickReference to be invaluable.