Russell, As a newbie I liked your piece. It's hard to write simply, and you have a good style. The examples given in the Zope book illustrating "objects" relate to a spaceship; I like the fact that yours is more relevant to real life website design. As for whether it is technically correct and sufficient, I will have to leave that to others, but I hope you will find encouragement and constructive criticism from other reviewers. Keep going! D.
What is an object? In the zope tutorial, an object was created for an email address. This object was the address itself (myname@zope.org). You create the object so that you only have to enter a few letters or words to get what you want, rather than having to write the whole thing out. The email address is really site contact information. If you have 10 pages that you want to have the same contact information, you want it all to go to the maintainer of a particular section of your site, you can create an object for this purpose. Our site contact object is composed of two properties. One is the actual email address. The other is what you want the object's name to be. The "Name" part is what you are calling the object. This is the part that goes with the <dtml-var> tag. The "Value" part is what will actually show. In this case "Value" is the email address itself. So if I choose webmaster as the "Name" part, whenever I type <dtml-var webmaster>, the html that people will see shows myname@zope.org. Okay, I haven't saved any typing, you may think to yourself. If this little bit of of typing had to be done over 10 pages, or 100, then the power is clear. If the wemaster changes, then you only have to change the address of this person once.
-- Douglas Carnall tel:+44 (0)20 7241 1255 fax:08700 557879 mob:07900 212881 http://www.carnall.org/ dougie@carnall.org