[Zope-CMF] Making a CMF Document render DTML

[Jean-Francois.Doyon@CCRS.NRCan.gc.ca]

Ausum,

Indeed, I just discovered CMF Article recently ... Might be handy in the
future.

All the options you mentionned had crossed my mind actually :)

But I'm stubborn! I have this OO architecture in there, so I want to use it.
I want things to be dynamic, and od things only once, the whole point of my
using Zope.

As you suggested the closest thing would've been to add a property that has
something like an ObjectID, and use that.  But again, I am restricted as to
where in the page that would appear, and that's too restrictive for my
needs.

Like I said in my message do Dieter, content shoudl be seperate from
presentation, BUT, that doesn't mean content can't be dynamic either :)

Thanks,
J.F.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ausum Studio [mailto:ausum_studio@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 3:03 PM
To: zope-cmf@zope.org
Subject: Re: [Zope-CMF] Making a CMF Document render DTML


I'm concluding that what you need is a workaround to the problem of
inserting structured subelements  within a document, am I right? Well, ...
join the club  ;)

I know there's a product called CMFArticle that deals with this, although it
uses a folderish object for the purpose, (though I haven't tested it and I
can tell how well it solves the problem). In fact I agree to the idea that
all other objects should behave like they can be one within another, without
the need to be folderish: A document can contain images, tables, multimedia
and/or topics(I'm thinking of the usual 'Related' box), all valid objects on
their own; an image can 'contain' captions shared by other elements like CAD
drawings or Flash animations. Think of every other possibility and soon
you'll find out that there's almost no limit for the atomization of the
content. So that's why current Types are just the starting point as well as
a reference.

Here's what I do. I create the subelement  from any of the current Types.
Let's say 'Quotes'. I create a quote out of a document type and then create
a view method to behave like my needs. Because of they are searchable I have
a modified 'search' method that opens a new window and gets the quotes
perfectly rendered one below another (think of an album full of captioned
photographs in the case of images), and then I just copy and paste it to the
IE's WYSIWYG editable body of my current document.(There are already many
editors who does this.) That doesn't solve the reamining problem that the
current document doesn't know it 'carries' another object, therefore an
update to the quote object doesn't update the document it's associated to,
but at least the job is done really fast.

The closest I've approached to solve this issue is to store a list of
id/type/path tuples of the objects you want inside, as an extra property.
That demands that you organize your document skin to support them, and so
they are opposed to the copy&paste workaround. Of course you could mix both
approaches by creating custon tags, regex-processed, but that I haven't
tried so far.


Ausum



----- Original Message -----
From: <Jean-Francois.Doyon@CCRS.NRCan.gc.ca>
To: <jeffrey@cuemedia.com>
Cc: <zope-cmf@zope.org>
Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 11:18 AM
Subject: RE: [Zope-CMF] Making a CMF Document render DTML


> Jeffrey,
>
> Agreed on all counts!
>
> I'm just hoping someone has done this before, or can help me figure out
how
> to :)  I'm not a big product developper and don't know the Zope code all
> that well.
>
> So I'm perfectly willing to do this work and share it, but I don't know
> enough to get it done right now :)
>
> So I've tracked down the HTML module form the Globals package, that seems
> should do what i want.  But not knowing the inner workings, I wonder,
would
> I be better off using DocumentTemplate instead? Then there's these
"client"
> objects I'm not too sure about ... and so on ...
>
> I suppose I could simply wrap a DTML Method into a CMF type, but
> unfortunately it's too late for me (My content allready exists in CMF
> Documents), and I'd rather simply change the Document type (CookedBody) to
> do what I want. (I know, there's a million reasons I shouldn't do that!).
>
> I suppose I'll eventually figure it out, but I'm going to suffer terribly
in
> the mean time, so I'm hoping someone out there can give me some pointers
(Or
> has done this allready).
>
> Cheers,
> J.F.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeffrey P Shell [mailto:jeffrey@cuemedia.com]
> Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 12:02 PM
> To: Jean-Francois.Doyon@CCRS.NRCan.gc.ca
> Cc: chrisw@nipltd.com; zope-cmf@zope.org
> Subject: Re: [Zope-CMF] Making a CMF Document render DTML
>
>
> I think it's a valid need, one that could be solved a myriad of ways.
> I don't think DTML (especially since this purpose of DTML is on its way
> out) based "CMF Documents" should be part of the core product, but it
> shouldn't be too difficult for you or someone to write a third party
> product that defines a 'CMF DTML Document' content type, and have that
> get integrated into the CMF.  The Default Document type is pretty bone
> simple (and similarly - needlessly complex) - but the key word is
> 'Default'.  It's meant to be replaceable by something that better suits
> your needs should you or someone else write the code to do it.
>
>
> On Friday, September 20, 2002, at 09:03  AM,
> Jean-Francois.Doyon@CCRS.NRCan.gc.ca wrote:
>
> > Because having a single template applicable to all documents is too
> > restrictive.  I want people to be able to contribute documents, and
> > take
> > advantage of the workflows, but not all documents will have the exact
> > same
> > layout.  In fact there's now way for me to predict what document
> > authors
> > might want. BUT I do have a template that does some stuff, like the
> > consistent look of the site, BUT, I do no want to dictate every detail
> > of
> > the layout.  Authors have to be able to decide whether they want an
> > image
> > justified left, or right, and so on. Currently this is all done by
> > putting
> > HTML inside the CMF Document, which is fine.
> >
> > The problem is that, in this particular case, we have tables that
> > appear all
> > over the site in various documents (And featured items, and news
> > items, etc
> > ...).  Right now these are done as HTML inside a CMF Document.  BUT it
> > would
> > make a whole lot more sense to make these tables as re-usable
> > components
> > (lists, formatted search results, whatever).  The problem is that I
> > cannot,
> > should not, and will not dictate where document authors can/should put
> > these
> > tables/lists in their documents.
>
> Another solution here would be to make different content types to
> handle tables, or other items, that present a nice editing interface
> for what they represent.  Or to use something like CMFArticle (or FDoc,
> if I can ever make time to put together a release) which are composite
> document based solutions - where a document is more than just a big
> block of text and is instead built out of smaller units representing
> text, images, etc.  But, to get the sort of results you're wanting, you
> may still need to write a fair amount of custom code to fit into the
> framework.  But that is the point of a framework - to enable developers
> to build custom solutions that fit into a larger picture and have many
> elements of that larger picture taken care of for them (ie - Workflow,
> etc).
>
> > So, the best bet would be to be able to put a DTML tag inside the body,
> > where ever the author chooses. I could tell the authors to simply use
> > <dtml-var "tablegenerator(item2,item5,item22)"> in their HTML code.
> > (Said
> > tables are just lists of other Zope objects)
>
> "Simply use"???  I think geeks need to strike this phrase from their
> vocabulary :).  It's like 'simply lo-fi the sampling rate using
> Latch.ar() with Impulse as a clock.'
>
> > Am I really the only one who would find this usefull?  Seems to me I
> > would
> > have the best of both worlds, a fully templated DTML aware object.  I
> > am
> > fully aware of the theory of seperating content from style and all
> > that, but
> > in my world, that's just not practical enough.  Telling authors (we
> > have
> > many) that ALL their documents should look the EXACT same (or at least
> > have
> > the exact same layout) isn't acceptable. Creating various templates
> > isn't
> > practical enough either, I'd have a different template for every
> > document!
> >
> > I can think of a million uses of CMF Documents containing DTML, not the
> > least of which is having workflows applicable to DTML rendered
> > (renderable?)
> > content.
> >
> > Help ? Please ? :)
>
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