[Zope-CMF] CMF - not in your face?

[seb bacon]

* Frank McGeough <fm@synchrologic.com> [010720 14:09]:
> How much of CMF can be hidden? All of it?
> 
> Most sites are divided up into the large number of people who use the site
> by browsing/searching; and the (relatively) small number of people who
> actually contribute content. Why is CMF setup so that all the CMF stuff is
> visible to every user? How would you go about hiding CMF from those large
> number of people. That is, no indication for the casual user of the web site
> that CMF is being used at all? If I had a URL that a contributor would have
> to go to login and then alter the actions_box DTML method would that do it?

The CMF is a *Framework*.  It provides services for building websites
quickly.  The services include workflow, indexing, personalisation,
etc...  The site you see when you create a 'Portal' is an example site
based on the requirements of the zope.org website.  It's not meant to
be a system you can use for managing the content on any website.  It's
just meant to be a sample / inspiration / example code.

You need to learn how to use dtml / more Zope before you can expect to
be able to configure the CMF to your requirements.  Maybe one day
it'll all be TTW configurable with a GUI, but for now, it's a
programming toolkit.

> The key is the actions_box stuff and I'm having trouble figuring out how to
> manipulate the code in there since it's doing mystery stuff like :
> 
> <dtml-in user_actions mapping>
> <a href="&dtml-url;"><dtml-var name></a>&nbsp; | &nbsp;
> </dtml-in>
> 
> hey! where's the for loop :-) If I could figure out more about DTML I might
> be able to at least understand why I can or can't do what I want. Is it
> correct that the zope creators are moving away from this DTML syntax and
> toward Python (which I can read). Thanks for any clues for the clueless.

Read the DTML chapter in the Zope book, and the stuff about
PythonScripts, and you'll be well on your way to understanding.
<dtml-in> *is* a for loop, incidentally.  And you're right, there will
be a slow move away from DTML, but it'll take a while.  The
replacement is ZPT, which still hasn't arrived in a mature form yet
(though it's very cool, works well, and lots of people are using it
already). 

seb