I appreciate the kudos and the framework reference. It sounds like we're in somewhat similar situations (managing lots of little sites) and I certainly agree with your points about dynamic serving and webcrawlers. The Zope community still has some thinking to do about how heavily Zoped sites will interact with the rest of the world. You should know, however, that I'm having to rethink my "solution" to the Zope sub-tree serving problem; My footnote about __bobo_traverse__ led right into a snakepit. Any URL leading to a Product method (I think) is liable to pass through __bobo_traverse__. This won't matter too much to me if it only affects management, such as adding new Product instances, as I can just use the full proper URL. It doesn't make for a great general solution though, and I'm nervous about what else may be affected. Also, the "only statics have periods" part of my framework required a bit of Product-munging. Confera, for instance, puts an extension on its internal images. Thank Prime for Open Source. -----Original Message----- From: Jim Salmons <salmons@sohodojo.com> Date: Monday, June 28, 1999 10:11 AM

Evan,

Thanks for the EXCELLENT post to the ZOPE Admin list (Digest Vol.1-#291-Message #1).

I hope you, Evan, do not mind, but I 'reprinted' this post here:

http://sohodojo.com/forums/Forum14/HTML/000001.html

My primary interest in ZOPE is for the building of role-based executable business model frameworks (the technical side of our interest in 'ruthlessly small business' where the 'few heads, many hats' time management dilemma rules). You can find out more about 'ZOPE, Mirror Worlds and Executable Models' at:

http://sohodojo.com/scripts/Ultimate.cgi

In addition to the challenges of constructing these frameworks (I am an ex-Smalltalker who refuses to 'do Java'!), I am wrestling with the 'static/dynamic' problem as well, primarily for reasons having to do with search engine crawling, etc.

I don't care what others' say. Of the search engines that count, my experience on our five sites is that there are plenty of situations where you had better have '.htm' or 'html' static pages, not even includes, if you want them indexed. (Getting hit doesn't automatically mean getting indexed, especially if the hit file is not parseable under the crawler's assumptions about HTML tagging.)

So anyone with a commercial site (and not too big of an advertising budget!) that doesn't intend to use a combination of static and dynamic content is asking to become "The Invisible Site."

I know, I saw it happen dramatically at one of our 'nano-subsidiaries', The Pop Culture Store. Months back, I thought I was so clever doing some nice Perl-based inventory management and item viewers. Within weeks the site did a 'disappearing act' and sales went with it.... the static item pages were an unappreciated good thing! (And, hey, no wisecracks about it being Perl!)