[Zope] (Fwd) Zope musings

[Martijn Faassen]

David Ascher wrote: 
> I'll jump in, since this is an issue I worry about w.r.t Zope's success
> well for places I know, such as university departments where faculty, not
> hackers, do web page editing and e.g. my organization, where I want e.g.
> the HR manager to be able to edit the web pages and blissfully ignore all
> of the cool Zope features that the webmaster really likes...

I'm planning to use Zope at a university department and thinking hard
about how to use Zope to make editing content (especially text) *really*
easy for these people. The previous set of webpages hasn't been updated
since 1997 or so, and then barely so, so it has got to be trivial.

The solution I'm thinking about revolves around Structured Text and a
trick I got working today (see my post about role information for more
info). My idea is quite simple; a typical web page consists of content
and layout (of course there's overlap). The layout is designed by
someone who's HTML savvy. Wherever there's editable content, this person
leaves a tag like <!--#var "editable(some_id)"-->. 

'editable' is an external method which does different things based on
what role you have. If you're role anonymous, it just passes the text
document associated with some_id through structured text, and displays
it. If you're role 'editor' (or manager or whatever) it does the same,
but it prepends a hyperlink. Clicking the hyperlink gets you into a very
simple textarea form, where you can enter structured text and press
'change' and you're done updating the web page.
You turn into 'editor' by logging into a special page (just like logging
into the management screen makes you manager).

This is about as trivial as it can get. There's not much freedom, but
the people we're talking about aren't too concerned about freedom and
flexibility (that's possibly why Microsoft is so successful :). 

[emacs discussion snipped :)]

Uses-emacs-all-day-long-too-ly yours,

Martijn