[Zope] Questions about Zope strategy

[Ethan Fremen]

Alexandre Ratti wrote:
> - Setup
> However, site management and text
> update would need to be carried out over dial-up connections (33600 bps
> modem; 64000 ISDN connections at best) when the site is online.
> => Do you feel that the slow access could be a major problem?

I'm building a site over a 33.6 modem and find it fairly quick.  I do,
however, prototype everything in a local copy of zope first.
 
> I'd need to find some way to add
> the header and footer markers (in a template in the editor, maybe).

You don't necessarily need to do this:  make the index_html in the root
directory look something like this:
<dtml-var standard_html_header>
<dtml-var content>
<dtml-var standard_html_footer>

and then have content (a DTML method) in each subfolder contains only
the content you want... if you need more documents, you might need to
make multiple templates. (there may be a more elegant solution...
anyone?)
 
> When updating the pages they could export them to HTML, modify them locally
> and reimport them into the database later using Upload.
> => Is this OK? AFAIK it's not possible to export to HTML an existing page
> content without rendering it. I guess I'd need to create a Python script.

A few ways to do this:  
1. go to the edit screen, copy-paste.  
2. FTP in to zope and download the object. This has the added bonus of
preserving the document type when you upload-*unless* your ftp client
deletes the zope copy before uploading, which apparently Emacs and some
other clients do.
3. 'export' the object, then import it into a local zope, vice versa for
uploading.
 
> - General database maintenance could be carried out by a couple of
> "techies" in the organization. However, text changes may also be carried
> out by people with little or no previous experience in HTML coding. We
> would train them but I'd like to keep things as simple as possible. In some
> cases I may use forms to guide text entry.

you can do this, but a content model like I suggested above, along with
permissions set so only content objects can be modified, would allow
text changes to be carried out on only the modifyable content.  You can
teach them <em> and <strong>, I imagine :-). With stylesheets, you can
keep content consistent- H1 looks one way, etc.

-- 
~mindlace