John Poltorak wrote:

On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 07:04:48PM +0100, Peter Bengtsson wrote:

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How about the 2 chapters in the Zope book?

I just don't find this book very helpful at all. It's written as a manual rather than tutorial and reminds me of a book which explains how to chop down a tree if you are interested in putting up some bookshelves.

What I did find useful, though, was this worked example of how to put together a simple application:-

http://www.plope.com/Books/2_7Edition/SimpleExamples.stx#1-6

That was much more useful than anything else I've come across so. Just wish there were a few more examples.

Interesting. If you like examples, be sure to get familiar with Zopelabs.com (zope cookbook)

It probably is very useful, but I know I'd get hopelessly lost because there is just so much stuff on it. Most of the newbie stuff about macros is probably quite old by now so I doubt whether I'd find it with a sequential browse through the Cookbook. It's disappointing to find that the link from Newbies under the ZOPE section does not function.

What I really need is something like a ZPT macro which defines a header and footer and leaves a slot in the middle for my own content. I don't expect to be able to write my own macro for quite a while - too many pitfalls... I'm not even sure is that is how I should be approaching writing a home page.

You think it is harder than it is. I can show you by no more than copy/paste from the ZMI help system. The macro page (from Help! > Zope Help > ZPT Reference > metal:define-slot) we will call 'master.html':: <p metal:define-macro="hello"> Hello <b metal:define-slot="name">World</b> </p> A client page (from metal:fill-slot):: <p metal:use-macro="container/master.html/macros/hello"> Hello <b metal:fill-slot="name">Kevin Bacon</b> </p> In CMF/Plone/etc, one would usually say 'context' instead of 'container' because of the skins sytem. It is not a great intellectual leap to replace "Hello" with header-type page structure, and replace the whitespace after the slot with footer-type structure. --jcc -- "Building Websites with Plone" http://plonebook.packtpub.com/ Enfold Systems, LLC http://www.enfoldsystems.com