[Zope] The Honest Scoop on Zope

[Terrel Shumway]

From: John Goerzen [mailto:jgoerzen@complete.org]

>Well, I've been working with it for some time and am still confused as 
>to how to do simple things like set variables properly, cast data
>types (ie, string to a date, etc.), and why variables sometimes
>disappear.  Also the syntax is a little strange (I can't figure out
>how to embed a quation mark inside a string passed to a function in
>dtml-call), so the learning curve is not exactly great, but otherwise, 
>I really like it.  The documentation is rather sparse, which hurts
>more than it otherwise would.  Perhaps if I knew Python, it would be a 
>bit better?

The Python tutorial may help with things like embedding quotes and "casting"

(Python is dynamically typed: casting is a foreign concept).
 http://www.python.org/doc

setting variables in Zope more like lisp than python or perl

quickly:

<dtml-let var1=expr1 var2=expr2>
  <dtml-var var1 fmt="date" ...>
  <dtml-var var2 ...>
</dtml-let>

or 
<dtml-with some-complicated-expression>
   use the generated namespace
</dtml-with>

I have found http://www.zope.org:18200/Members/Cyberrunner/QuickReference to
be invaluable.