[Zope] newbie question (repost)

[Quinn Dunkan]

I posted this a while ago, but recieved no response, so I assume it either
didn't make it, or everyone hates me.  And if it's the latter, they'll hate
me even more for reposting, but... such is life.  Maybe someone could at least
flame me so I know mail is working :)

Well, I'm actually using Bobo right now, but this should be applicable to
ZPublisher (here's a question: I understand that bobo users are encouraged to
switch to ZPublisher... are there any "issues" to be aware of?  Is there a
document that describes how one might make such a switch as painless as
possible?  I'd like to use ZTemplate for cDocumentTemplate, but I'd probably
have to use ExtensionClass with that.  I suppose that's as easy as sticking
the .so in my $PYTHONPATH and putting an import ExtensionClass in ZTemplate's
__init__.py?).  Anyway, I've been messing around with Bobo for a while now,
and have a few questions:

I have a few email forms that I want a method to pretty up and send to the
appropriate person.  Here's how I'm doing it now, but I know there's a Right
Way that involves dtml and all that.  I await enlightenment, RTFM, etc.

How I did it (after finding out about REQUEST), was to write a
mail(form_name, REQUEST) function that looks for a function named form_name
and passes it REQUEST.form, then mails the string returned.  form_name is
communicated via a hidden <input> in each form.  Ok, so this all seems
fairly zope-zenful, but my prettification functions seem to be asking for
dtml or something.

My current approach is to say:
def mr_form(a):
    msg = untab("""\
        %(name)s
        %(email)s
        %(comments)s
    """)
    
    return msg % MsgDict(a)

Where MsgDict wraps a dictionary except returns "fieldname: value" when it
finds the value and "fieldname: (not given)" when it doesn't.  Now this
doesn't work when things get marginally more complicated, so if I want
an address printed out right, and not like

address: 123 road
city: centerville (a great place to raise your kids up)
state: etc.

I did this:
def mr_form(a):
    msg = untab("""\
        %(name)s
        Address:
            %(adress)s
            %(city)s, %(state)s %(zip code)s
    """)

    dict = {}
    for i in "address", "city", "state", "zip code", "country":
        if dict.has_key(i):
            dict[i] = dict[i]
        else:
            dict[i] = "(no %s given)" % i

    return format(msg % UnionDict(dict, MsgDict(a)))

which is worse yet, but works.  UnionDict overlays dictionaries by looking in
each one successively, and format() breaks lines over 70 columns.

Ok, so what's the right way to do this?  I may seem stupid for recreating all
sorts of functionality that may already exist in dtml, but I read and read and
read the docs and source-code (even the howto on zope.org for "Creating a Mail
Form", but it assumed I was using full-fledged zope, which I'm not (I'm just
the cgi programmer, I can't switch the whole site to zope even if I'd like
to)).  I imagine there are a lot of people in my situation who aren't
designing a brand new site from scratch but would still like to use
ZPublisher/ZTemplate without all the other stuff.  I think it would be useful
to have a clearly marked portion of the docs that say "These pertain to
ZP/ZT-only sites."  The stuff in "Zope Developer Information" (basically the
old bobo docs) would be good there, perhaps with less scary names.  I think
it's great that zope components can be used seperately.

Here's another question:  I know dtml supports both html-comment-like and python
string-like syntax, but everyone seems to use the html-comment.  I prefer python
syntax since it looks less cluttered to me (and I think it's a good thing that
my dtmls don't resemble ssi)...  is there any particular reason to use one
over the other, or is it purely personal preference?  (And why does everyone
seem to prefer the (ugly, IMHO) html-comment syntax?)

Also, my thought regarding the "dtml tags look like html comments so it's hard
to write them in html editors" discussion is why not use python-string syntax?
It has no relation to xml, but dtml is really sort of a meta-language anyway,
isn't it?  And at least no editor is going to mistake a python-string for
html or xml.

One of the things Bobo/ZPublisher touts is the ease of using things like pcgi,
fcgi, etc.  I've been using fcgi, but I wasn't able to find a cgi-template
style script for it, so I wrote my own.  Granted, it was trivial (provided I
did it right), but it would still be nice if it was included, or the
documentation said where I could download it.

Actually, it's not being that trivial.  The problem I'm having with fcgi is
that scripts are persistant, like pcgi.  That means when you fix a bug you have
to restart the script before it shows up.  Which is a problem when the script
is run by the httpd server and you have no permission to send signals to it.
Perhaps I'm once again missing the obvious solution that must be there, but I
had my fcgi-module-publisher look for a file with the same name as the script
in a "semaphores" directory, and exit when it sees that.  Ugly, but it works.

I'm investigating zope proper, but I have trouble finding where the content
actually _is_!  I guess it's all pickled in the var directory and in various
dtml / python source lying around, but I'm much more comfortable editing
python and dtml with vim than filling out web forms / downloading stuff
developed off-line.  I guess ZServer's ftp server ought to make this a bit
nicer, but I thought a nifty solution would be to write zope as a filesystem
server, and then it could do all sorts of stuff not related to the www.  Of
course, unix is not very friendly to this sort of thing, we'd need something
like plan9 or qnx or vsta :)

thanks!