Thanks very much, that was helpful. I mean as my front end pages - should they be ZPTs preferably? WRT Apache - this is an Intranet and I think the simplicity of Zserver will be useful and the power of Apache isn't needed. E. -----Original Message----- From: Tino Wildenhain [mailto:tino@wildenhain.de] Sent: 29 January 2004 12:22 To: Edward Comber Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Beginners questions Hi Edward, Edward Comber schrieb:

1) Is the Zope Book available in downloadable HTML form?

Yes, but not in archive form I fear. You would use a tool like wget or pavuk. There are some older versions available as pdf iirc. Just follow the links.

2) Can I (and are there reasons why I should not) get Zserver to work on Port 80. I don't want to confuse my users.

Its perfectly possible when there is nothing already running on that port and you start zope as admin/root to have access to port numbers below 1024. Most people however feel more comfortable to use apache, pond or squid as proxy, loadbalancer and sanetizer in front of Zope. You can configure Zserver to listen on any port and any interface you want. (There are several howtos and links from the mailingliste)

3) ZPT vs DHTML. Straight away I am confused by this, and I need to know which to focus my attention on. I get the impression that the preferred order is ZPT, DHTML Methods, DHTML Templates. I came to Zope from programming in Python, if that helps. My plan is to start with ZPT - is that correct?

I think you refer to DTML. DHTML is a complete different beast, it just sounds similar :-) Python is good. I'd even say perfect for beginning. You should experiment with the "Python Script" objects, which you can understand as methods at the folder they are created in. You can return arbitrary complex nested datastructures (often lists with dictionaries in them) from these methods - you can test them separately to see if output matches what you want and then later include these calls in ZPT. No need for DTML unless you want to use ZSQL-Methods which require some knowledge in DTML.

4) Is here a more appropriate place to ask beginners questions?

Here is perfect. Regards Tino Wildenhain

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 13:32:09 -0000 "Edward Comber" <comber@cix.co.uk> wrote:

Thanks very much, that was helpful.

I mean as my front end pages - should they be ZPTs preferably?

In my opinion, index_html should almost always be a Script (Python). Its main reason for existence is to choose what will be presented to the user next, that is, it is inherently logic! What is presented should be, at least 95% of the time, ZPT based.

WRT Apache - this is an Intranet and I think the simplicity of Zserver will be useful and the power of Apache isn't needed.

Tino has already added static content as a reason for apache. Another is mod_rewrite. You can use this to redirect users to different machines, or ports transparently. This will save you much grief when you are porting between releases, as you can keep the older, working version in place and phase in the new version folder by folder. Yet another reason is SSL support; even on the intranet, I use SSL traffic, so that when it leaves the premises I won't forget and leave cleartext passwords. Jim Penny