[Zope-dev] Re: A z3c.jbot without a monkey

[Malthe Borch]

Fred Drake wrote:
> On Jan 18, 2008, at 10:35 AM, Malthe Borch wrote:
>> In the current implementation, z3c.jbot monkeys its way into
>> zope.pagetemplate to easily allow overriding the template source file.
> 
> Whacky.

Sure it's wacky; it's also the only straightforward way to customize 
Plone at the moment.

> Is this really a page template problem?  It doesn't seem so.

I'm not sure of it is, but certainly it's quite logically to want to 
take an existing template and change a bit, only you don't want to 
change the original package of course. Point being that the template 
itself is a very concrete object of interest and it's easy to understand 
how to customize it.

> Why not make the separation cleaner?  One pattern that we see hinted at 
> in zope.formlib is that views (UI for the logic) reference templates 
> that are registered elsewhere by name.  The implementation there suffers 
> in that the templates themselves aren't (so can't be selected based on 
> the skin/layers), but if they're made to be named views of the (logic) 
> view, all the flexibility you describe can be had.

Right certainly named templates is one way to do it. The approach I took 
was assigning canonical names based on the actual location on the file 
system and the package.

I'm not saying it's the right approach, but it's certainly an approach 
that works well with packages that define skins using 
ViewPageTemplateFile-objects.

\malthe