[Zope-CMF] re: Adopting CMF

[Paul Winkler]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 06:21:57PM +0200, Fernando Martins wrote:
> Hello Paul,
> 
> many thanks for your reply. I'm a bit puzzled on the embedded logic comments
> but I've the directions I needed to experiment.
> 
> Paul Winkler wrote:
> > If you have presentation logic embedded in your content (very
> > likely if they are dtml or zpt), you will have to strip it out.
> > Some search/replace on the filesystem before you upload might help here.
> 
> Hmm, I've a few HTML files and the rest are ZPT pages displaying information
> from a MySQL database.
> 
> I hope you're not telling me these pages will not work??

Sure they'll work, if you keep them as zpt and don't convert them to
CMF Documents which are just static content with metadata.
That's what would happen if you do ftp upload into the cmf content space
as i suggested.

In general, anything dynamic - ZPTs or whatever - is software, and software
belongs in the skins or, if it's some kind of general-purpose service,
it should maybe become a Tool (like the portal_catalog, portal_workflow etc.)
The idea with CMF is that you keep your software separate from your static
content; even though some things in the skins (e.g. search results & the
like) might be thought of as "content" by the end user, they are really
software.

So, if you download to the filesystem as I suggest, I'd do some reorganization
before uploading into cmf. Identify anything dynamic, like your SQL
results pages, and put those in a folder that you'll upload into portal_skins.
I think that in portal_skins, uploaded html will be instantiated as ZPT
but I don't recall - it might be DTML.

All the static stuff can then be uploaded directly into CMF where 
directories will become Portal Folders, html files will become Documents,
etc.

> And what about Zope products in general like LocalFS, VirtualHostMonster,...

VHM works fine with CMF. LocalFS, not sure... there might be a 
CMF-specific version, maybe google a bit.  But in general, 
if something is *content* and you want to use it in CMF, 
you really need to use a CMF-enabled version so it will be properly 
handled by the CMF tools like workflow.

That's probably the biggest CMF drawback: you can't just drop
in any old zope content object. Well, you can, but it won't get workflow,
metadata, or your CMF interface for editing etc.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
Look! Up in the sky! It's MICRO SNOTNOSE!
(random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)