I posted this a while ago, but recieved no response, so I assume it either didn't make it, or everyone hates me. And if it's the latter, they'll hate me even more for reposting, but... such is life. Maybe someone could at least flame me so I know mail is working :) Well, I'm actually using Bobo right now, but this should be applicable to ZPublisher (here's a question: I understand that bobo users are encouraged to switch to ZPublisher... are there any "issues" to be aware of? Is there a document that describes how one might make such a switch as painless as possible? I'd like to use ZTemplate for cDocumentTemplate, but I'd probably have to use ExtensionClass with that. I suppose that's as easy as sticking the .so in my $PYTHONPATH and putting an import ExtensionClass in ZTemplate's __init__.py?). Anyway, I've been messing around with Bobo for a while now, and have a few questions: I have a few email forms that I want a method to pretty up and send to the appropriate person. Here's how I'm doing it now, but I know there's a Right Way that involves dtml and all that. I await enlightenment, RTFM, etc. How I did it (after finding out about REQUEST), was to write a mail(form_name, REQUEST) function that looks for a function named form_name and passes it REQUEST.form, then mails the string returned. form_name is communicated via a hidden <input> in each form. Ok, so this all seems fairly zope-zenful, but my prettification functions seem to be asking for dtml or something. My current approach is to say: def mr_form(a): msg = untab("""\ %(name)s %(email)s %(comments)s """) return msg % MsgDict(a) Where MsgDict wraps a dictionary except returns "fieldname: value" when it finds the value and "fieldname: (not given)" when it doesn't. Now this doesn't work when things get marginally more complicated, so if I want an address printed out right, and not like address: 123 road city: centerville (a great place to raise your kids up) state: etc. I did this: def mr_form(a): msg = untab("""\ %(name)s Address: %(adress)s %(city)s, %(state)s %(zip code)s """) dict = {} for i in "address", "city", "state", "zip code", "country": if dict.has_key(i): dict[i] = dict[i] else: dict[i] = "(no %s given)" % i return format(msg % UnionDict(dict, MsgDict(a))) which is worse yet, but works. UnionDict overlays dictionaries by looking in each one successively, and format() breaks lines over 70 columns. Ok, so what's the right way to do this? I may seem stupid for recreating all sorts of functionality that may already exist in dtml, but I read and read and read the docs and source-code (even the howto on zope.org for "Creating a Mail Form", but it assumed I was using full-fledged zope, which I'm not (I'm just the cgi programmer, I can't switch the whole site to zope even if I'd like to)). I imagine there are a lot of people in my situation who aren't designing a brand new site from scratch but would still like to use ZPublisher/ZTemplate without all the other stuff. I think it would be useful to have a clearly marked portion of the docs that say "These pertain to ZP/ZT-only sites." The stuff in "Zope Developer Information" (basically the old bobo docs) would be good there, perhaps with less scary names. I think it's great that zope components can be used seperately. Here's another question: I know dtml supports both html-comment-like and python string-like syntax, but everyone seems to use the html-comment. I prefer python syntax since it looks less cluttered to me (and I think it's a good thing that my dtmls don't resemble ssi)... is there any particular reason to use one over the other, or is it purely personal preference? (And why does everyone seem to prefer the (ugly, IMHO) html-comment syntax?) Also, my thought regarding the "dtml tags look like html comments so it's hard to write them in html editors" discussion is why not use python-string syntax? It has no relation to xml, but dtml is really sort of a meta-language anyway, isn't it? And at least no editor is going to mistake a python-string for html or xml. One of the things Bobo/ZPublisher touts is the ease of using things like pcgi, fcgi, etc. I've been using fcgi, but I wasn't able to find a cgi-template style script for it, so I wrote my own. Granted, it was trivial (provided I did it right), but it would still be nice if it was included, or the documentation said where I could download it. Actually, it's not being that trivial. The problem I'm having with fcgi is that scripts are persistant, like pcgi. That means when you fix a bug you have to restart the script before it shows up. Which is a problem when the script is run by the httpd server and you have no permission to send signals to it. Perhaps I'm once again missing the obvious solution that must be there, but I had my fcgi-module-publisher look for a file with the same name as the script in a "semaphores" directory, and exit when it sees that. Ugly, but it works. I'm investigating zope proper, but I have trouble finding where the content actually _is_! I guess it's all pickled in the var directory and in various dtml / python source lying around, but I'm much more comfortable editing python and dtml with vim than filling out web forms / downloading stuff developed off-line. I guess ZServer's ftp server ought to make this a bit nicer, but I thought a nifty solution would be to write zope as a filesystem server, and then it could do all sorts of stuff not related to the www. Of course, unix is not very friendly to this sort of thing, we'd need something like plan9 or qnx or vsta :) thanks!