[Zope] Many Zope questions

[Kevin Dangoor]

-----Original Message-----
From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
To: zope@zope.org <zope@zope.org>
Date: Friday, September 03, 1999 12:58 PM
Subject: [Zope] Many Zope questions


Hello,

>I'm just new to Zope, and have some questions both on documentation
>and on overall architecture.

Welcome!

>First, despite reading the descriptions in the documentation, I still
>don't understand the difference between a DTML Method and a DTML
>Document, save that documents (apparently?) have their own properties
>(variables?)  When should I use one, when should I use the other, etc?

That is basically the difference. Some commands will work a bit differently,
since DTML within a Document is acting on the Document itself and DTML
within the Method acts on the Method's container (ie Folder, etc.)

I generally just use Documents in times when I want the Document to have
properties of its own. Otherwise, I tend to use Methods.

>Next question.  I'm wanting to take a site, say http://www.aclug.org/
>that I currently maintain with a set of m4 macros, and put it into
>Zope.  I'd like to do nice dynamic things like, say, have a Quick
>Links bar that is defined somewhere.  This could then be turned on or
>off by the user (probably by saving a cookie).  Also, maybe I'd like
>to use this Quick Links bar in other documents.  First, I suspect that
>I should then make an object with the Quick Links bar.  How do I
>import that object into documents later?  There was a reference in the
>DTML manual to an addDocument function, but I can't find any
>information on that function.

You would probably want to make the Quick Links bar a DTML Method. This
makes it easy to include it wherever you wish.

<dtml-var quicklinks>

>Also, how do I go about doing the dynamic inclusion and cookie
>settings?  Specifically, how do I make a "click here to remove" thing
>that will set a cookie saying to not display that particular part?

To set the cookie, you just use:
<dtml-call "RESPONSE.setCookie('hideql', '1')">

Then, in your documents, you just put:
<dtml-if hideql>
<dtml-else>
 <dtml-var quicklinks>
</dtml-if>

If this is something you would want on every doc, you would probably put it
in your standard_html_header

>How do I do virtual hosting with Zope?  For instance, let's say I have
>5 websites, each with different domain names, but hosted on the same
>machine.  Right now, I've got Zope's special server going (not using
>the Apache tie-in).  Do I need to use the Apache tie-in, and if so,
>does this have a negative impact on performance?

I let others comment on this one...

>There are some things that just cannot easily be put into Zope.  For
>instance, I have software that creates a HTML tree for mailing list
>archives, and updates the tree each night.  With Apache, I just set an
>Alias so that these items can be easily seen.  How can I do this with
>Zope?  Is it even possible?

If you end up using Apache, which you might since you want to do virtual
hosting, you can continue doing this as you do now and just set up a
RewriteRule so that the mail list archive path is served up as standard
HTML.

If you do really want it in Zope, you could use XML-RPC or ZClient to update
things via cron.

>What sort of logs does the Zope server produce?  Can they be formatted
>to be like Apache's so standard web log analyzer software can parse
>them?

I believe they are standard log format.

Kevin