[Zope] Newbie : Zope publishing of Static pages

[Chris McDonough]

Satheesh Babu wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm new to Zope, knows li'l bit of Python. Here is my situation, in a new
> job.
> 
>   1) We have a fairly big site (25 departmental sections, 2000-1500 pages)
>   2) All the pages are static (Yeah! you want to change the look of
>              pages in your site, you edit all these files, or call a perl
> regex master :-(
> 
>   3)What we want is a publishing tool, which can help webmasters to maintain
> the site
>      and to delegate responsibility to departmental contact points to
> maintain their sections.
>   4)From what I fiddled around with Zope, this is perfect tool.
> 
>   5)But, we've an IIS server running which serves the pages. My question is,
> can I use
>     Zope to manage the website? I know Zope stores the HTML pages in its own
> database
>     (right?). What I love to have is some situation just like that, but all
> those facilities
>     actually correspond to the files in the IIS root folder. (I checked
> localFS product,
>     but I'm not sure how to use that for such a situation).

Yes, Zope stores files in its own database (the ZODB).

> 
>     One *silly* way is to go to each page in the Zope site, save the HTML in
> the IIS's root
>     directory (He He! what about using "wget"?). But I think it is really a
> stupid solution,
>         *I AM A ZOPE NEWBIE* !!!
>     (but I can use that - make wget run every 2 hours to automatically
> update the site!).

Well, do your HTML files absolutely need to reside on the NT
filesystem?  What you're used to doing now (editing single html files by
hand or batch-changing oodles of files with a perl script) is generally
done differently in Zope (using document templates coupled with data
stored in the ZODB or in a SQL database).

What kind of a commitment do you have to working "the old way"?  When I
say this I mean how many people are going to be really upset that they
can't use Front Page or Visual Interdev they way they're used to using
them anymore?  :-)  Note that Zope has no facility for accomodating
Front Page extensions when serving up document objects.  This sounds
trivial, but it can really be an issue for some people.

I think your question is actually a bigger one.  What you're really
doing is moving from a static view of your site to a more dynamic one. 
And in the process, you're moving from "normal" per-page web development
tools to more sophisticated ones (such as an appserver which serves
content dynamically like Zope).  Doing this is going to require some
planning.

Your idea about using Zope to store "master" documents that get wget'ted
out to the NT filesystem will in theory *work*, and you'll gain the
content management benefits of Zope, but you'll be foregoing most of the
straightforward benefits derived from dynamic page generation.  It will
also be very confusing for your users, probably.

> 
> If you have some pointers, PLEASE let me know! (Well, all this can be
> avoided if I'm able
> to use Zserver to serve up pages - for reasons I can't explain, I need to
> stick to
> IIS. May be Apache, if I cry out loud!).

You can use IIS to serve pages out of Zope.   The files don't get stored
on the NT filesystem, they're stored in the object database.  But you
can front-end Zope with IIS.

> 
> TIA
> VSB
> 
>    ~  V.Satheesh Babu sbabu@tnc.org
>   . .     http://www.csoft.net/~vsbabu/
>   /V\ - Duct tape is like the force.  It has
>  // \\  a light side, and a dark side, and
> /(   )\ it holds the universe together ...
>  ^'~'^
> 
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-- 
Chris McDonough - Digital Creations, Inc.
Publishers of Zope - http://www.zope.org