[Zope-dev] Correct Usage of Page Templates

Brian R Brinegar brinegar@ecn.purdue.edu
Fri, 4 Oct 2002 12:32:38 -0500 (EST)


Good Day,

I'm having trouble grasping the complete usage of Page Templates. I
understand the beauty of TAL and METAL.

I have say a hundred secretaries that use WebDAV clients to create and
edit content. Currently if one of them creates new content in say MS Word
and drags it on to the Zope server a File object is created. What I want
is to have an object with the look and feel of my standard_template
created.

I can use a put factory to have it create a new page template instead of a
file. But then I get a page template that does not use the look and feel
of the standard template. I could even change the default template to do
something more reasonable but the user must create the file/object on the
server and then edit it. A file/object cannot be created on the client and
dropped in place on the server.

I do not want to try to teach these people METAL or tell them anything
about macros. I just want the content to drop in and fit with the look of
my site.

I have found that I can create a standard_template with:

 <div tal:content="structure here/data">Content</div>

in the body and then access files like index.html/standard_template and
everything works great. The problem is that the users have to know to
create links with /standard_template after the file.

Am I thinking about something wrong? My users don't understand HTML or
Tags they know MS Word and Dreamweaver. If I tell them to edit anything in
source view they scream at me.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
-Brian Brinegar
 Web System Developer / Programmer