[Zope-dev] Making index_html a PageTemplate

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Hello everyone,

I have been hanging around #zope on IRC a lot recently and noticed that 
a lot of newbies ask a lot of DTML questions. I tried to answer their 
questions but I always pointed them to ZPT in the end. I was amazed that 
the majority had never heard of ZPT or thought that their problem could 
only be solved with DTML.

I've been emailing with Chris McDonough (see out thread on the ZDP 
mailinglist) and we found that the following two reasons might be 
responsible to this:

   a) newbies, esp. scripters, like to play around without reading docs

   b) the tutorial is grossly out of date

a) seems is a common behaviour which we cannot change. We can, however, 
change what newbies find on their path of trial and error. I think a big 
false symbol is that index_html is still a DTML Method. Everybody with 
some knowledge of web suite building knows what a index.html is so they 
will most likely look at that object named index_html. They see that it 
is a DTML Method so they'll say "Aha! HTML in Zope is done with DTML 
Methods".

Therefore, I propose to make index_html a PageTemplate for 2.7. Since 
this change would not affect the framework at all, it should not 
interfere with the release schedule for 2.7. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thoughts?

Phil