[Zope] site structure (fwd)

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 06:25:19PM +0100, Max M wrote:

> Some things are pretty hard to do in zope, because of the header/footer
> principle.
> 
> Making a global look to a site can be pretty difficult if it doesn't fit
> nicely into a header/footer structure, with a main area being the pages'
> unique content.

Although I agree that Zope misses real templates (like in M4 or, to
take a more Web-centric example, in WML
<http://www.engelschall.com/sw/wml/>, there are several workarounds:

1) if you need "standard" elements between header and footer, a bit of
  discipline from the page authors (which can be helped by tools like
  HTML-kit, where you can define a template for the new and empty
  page):

  <dtml-var header>
  ... Content here
  <dtml-var inbetween>
  .. More content here
  <dtml-var footer>

2) DTML methods allow you to replace a lot of what would be
   document-specific elements (such as context-dependant navigation
   bars), helping to stay in the header/footer paradigm. On the other
   hand, they are very complicated to use properly.