On Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:49:47 -0800 Rich Robinson <richrobinson2005@yahoo.com> wrote:
At this point, the site is great for managing content via the database. However, as far as I can see pretty much all the content needs to fit into templates, with the result that there appears to be little room for setting up a more free-form looking page that can incorporate graphics in a freer, more visual way.
Well, *ANY* system that generates a web page is going to have that problem. Yes, you *CAN* make it more "free form", but freedom carries responsibility -- the code will be much more complicated. And of course, Humans are smart. Your readers will eventually figure out the "trick" no matter how smart your code is (that is, they will be able to predict its behavior, thus find it unsurprising, hence "dull" compared to pages designed by Humans). That's just life, really. "Hand crafted" is recognizeable, and "machine generated" is never going to be it.
Sure, we can add images and any HTML we like, but they are confined to the areas designated by the templates. In other words, the site tends to "look like" a database-driven website - not unpleasing by any means, but I'm wondering if Zope lends itself to more "creative" looking pages that departs from the templated look.
*However*, the layout of the page can itself be database driven (whether we are talking about an external RDBMS or the ZODB within Zope). It is entirely possible to design a page in which the structure itself varies according to the content. But, as I said above, this is more complicated. I have pulled background images from a randomly-ordered list, based on the date or time of viewing (this is much more scalable than picking randomly on each pull, because it means that ALL people viewing the page at the same time will need the SAME image, so it can be cached). I have written markup structured to build words out of images, based on the content of the words (an alternative to using special fonts, which is a bit more wasteful of bandwidth, but allows *any* kind of font). I have written Zope table-layouts that cascaded in a zigzag pattern down the page, distributing the content in an apparently "out of square" layout (actually it really is in squares, but they partially overlap). I wrote a table layout generator that makes "clock" patterns with 12 table cels arranged in a circle. And of course, you can always intersperse "hand crafted" pages" with data-driven content pages, or combine both on the same page. -- Terry Hancock (hancock@AnansiSpaceworks.com) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com