First: again apologizing for having mixed up the words "vice" and "wise". I truely felt like an idiot and a no-brain. I hope I did not insult anybody. Mea maxima culpa. The bacground for my message was my eagernes to try to contribute, even with my small abilities, to the zope community which I find great and impressive! That stupid word "vice", I must have gotten in my head from the TV-series Miami Vice, some years ago. To much TV is dangerous :-) Now to the problem: I have a long time been fighting to find and establish something that I think in your language is called a "persistent variable". This variable, I wanted to use to personalize a website. Further, as my programming knowledge is so severe, I was looking for an easy way to do this, i.e. something that in pseudo code would look like this: set variable A let A = 1 And then later use variable A like this: if A = 1 do something However, I did not find an easy way to do this. My next plan was then to use cookies: <dtml-call expr="RESPONSE.setCookie('guest', 'C')"> And this: <dtml-if expr="REQUEST.has_key('guest', 'C')"> <dtml-var site_map> </dtml-if> However this also did not work. It was as though my cookie disappeared. Chris Withers then supplied mit with the following help: "You could look in REQUEST.cookies to be more on the safe side. I wonder what path is being set on your cookies? '/' is always a safe bet to prevent wierdness like this." I have try to understand and togle with this, but maybe I still do not understand the concept of cookies and the REQUEST object. I still cannot make it work. However, now I just read Dieter Maurers message (Re: [Zope] Variables and SubFolders): "Unless you do special things (modifiy a persistent object or store something in a session object) Zope forgets everything about a request as soon as it has been completed. Read the Zope Book (on zope.org) to learn something about sessions. Look for "manage_changeProperties" to learn how to modify properties of persistent objects. My question is then: Is properties maybe the easiest way to establish some "persistent variable" to play with in zope? (Sessions will until some more time unfortunately be to advanced for me.) I have also on this topic received the following good advices: - "The users are able to customise certain aspects of my application then the preferences are stored in a MySql database. When the user logs in, the application checks their user id and password but also reads in their preferences. These are used to apply style sheets and other various bits of customisation." [Stephen Slack] - "hint : Don't get started too much on DTML. Use python-scripts for things like this, and ZPT for presentation." [Geir Bækholt] I know I should follow these advices, but until some more time, both Python, zpt and sql databases are unfortunately beyond my knowledge ;-) Kind regards Børge