Seb Bacon writes:

I know how to create a form that does what I want (update properties, whatever). What I don't know is how to include it as part of the rendered content programmatically. At the moment users have to go to www.widgets.com/manage_content, log in, and see a set of forms loosely based on the Zope manage interface. Instead, I'd like them to go to the same url, and see exactly the same website as someone who's not logged in, except they have these lovely little "edit this" buttons next to each editable content element (by which I mean image, text snippet, etc).

Now I *could* do a

<dtml-if "AUTHENTICATED_USER.has_role('content manager')"> <a href="edit_this">edit this</a> </dtml-if>

in each content element. But I'd much rather be able to subclass or mixin an 'editable' class for each content element in question. The question is, what methods should I be providing to manipulate how the content is rendered? For example, I can provide a new 'view' method in the 'views' tab for a ZClass, but this does not get called when an object is rendered as part of another document. The reason I was going on about __str__ is because that seems to be the only place that you can interfere with how the content is rendered inline?

Hope that's clearer, I now do understand it better. Though, I have to admit that others understand you first problem statement better than I did.

DTML renders an object by 1. looking it up 2. calling it, if it is callable 3. stringifying the result by calling "str" Thus, for callable objects, changing the "__str__" will not help. For callable objects, "__call__" would need to be modified. However, I would strongly discourage to make such a drastic change to Zope objects: * a modification of "__call__" would not only affect rendering but also other use of objects (e.g. if DTML methods are used to validation and should return "0" or "1". * the pages could be littered with "edit me" buttons. It is (in general) not easy for your content manager to determine the object boundary which the "edit me" applies to. * we use DTML objects sometimes to factor out common "object"s such as e.g. the option list for HTML <select> tags. Automatically adding "edit me" would produce invalid HTML. I would rather suggest, you develop some method (or product), say "content_render", that can render an object (emulation the normal DTML rendering process) and can add whatever is necessary to facilitate management (e.g. visualizing object boundaries, placing "edit me"). Rather than <dtml-var xxx> you would then use <dtml-var "content_render(xxx,_)"> at places where the result would be usefull and legal (e.g. not inside a "select" tag). Have you looked at the PTK? You will find there some of your idea realized. However in a simplified form: a document contains a single "edit me" integrated to allow the owner to edit his content. Dieter