[Zope-CMF] Re: Proposal for hooking rendering

Martin Aspeli optilude at gmx.net
Wed Nov 30 08:59:25 EST 2005


> 1) Does the CMF have an interest in experimenting with ideas on 
> splitting corporate ID responsibilities from product skin responsibilities?

I certainly do. I'm actually of the opinion that ZPT is a pretty nice way of
doing UI re-use and customisation (no-one's shown me anything significantly
better yet, at least). However, I think there are two different audiences, as
you identify:

 - The developer who wants to re-use UI as much as possible
 - The corporate ID person who wants the site to be themed a certain way

I think that the main_template-with-slots approach works quite well for the
first audience. Most of the time, you just fill the main slot and be done with
it. I've seen some attempts at making the re-skinning job easier, but usually
it's hard to come up with one approach that fits both audiences, since they have
different skills and different needs.

 - The developer doesn't find ZPT particularly hard to grasp...
 - ...and want the flexibility of e.g. bypassing main_template entirely

 - The skinner may not want to learn TAL syntax...
 - ...but want to do more than what straight CSS can accomplish

I'm still not entirely sure how your proposal would deal with cases like moving
elements of a page around in a non-trivial way (e.g. changing the way things are
nested). Possibly this will just have to do with how carefully the various parts
of the site are defined with structural markup (only) and given ids. 

I'd really like to see a demo, and a more detailed comparison with the current
approach and alternative approaches.

Martin



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