I'm just an aspiring Zopester, but maybe can shed some light. I expect the wizards can set straight any misinformation I propagate... I was very glad for the link you cited, as the Zope documentation, though copious, leave some gaps in terms of examples.
One is the sidebar on the zope site, it is the menu and News column that runs down the left hand side. What is a sidebar_contents, is it a object type, a folder, or something else?
I'd say it's a method that returns a list, maybe from an internal or external data store. You can look at something here: http://www.zope.org/dtml_source?path=/sidebar_contents&pp=1 but in Zope it's hard for me to be sure whether stuff is real or virtual. Anyway, sidebar_contents seems to do something like I've been trying to implement on my pages: display 'sibling' links but show the current page NOT as a link.
Also what is a sequence-item, is it value stored in a sidebar_contents?
Sequence-item is a byproduct of the <!--#in foo--> tag processing, and indicates which of the iterations of the list is current.
The second thing that I had a question about was the navbar that runs across the top of each page. Is that a static element stored in the highest folder of the different sections or dynamicly created?
You can look at the code for the navbar using http://www.zope.org/dtml_source?path=/pathlinks&pp=1 which I discovered after following the link you provided to the sidebar code. My python skills are as yet almost nonexistent so the meaning of the code I can only guess at, but I'd say it is generated dynamically. So, folks, how can we get more code and commentary posted for beginners like me?