[Zope] Re. Question on Folder Structure strategy

[Jerry Spicklemire]

Just to second Evan's motion, "site relative" links will make it much
easier to move the Zope pieces you're building to another Zope instance, if
and when the time comes. It's pretty painless to simply "Export" a
subfolder, and then "Import" into another Zope, knowing that everything
will still work, even though the DNS address, and name (alias), of the host
has changed.

This is quite common in a corporate environment with separate dedicated
host machines, e.g., development, testing, and production. In this case
only the latter would be a live Web server with real end users hitting Zope
"pages", as opposed to us synthetic developer, and tester types.

If you use absolute paths, you'll either have to go through all those hard
coded addresses, and change them, which is nothing but completely avoidable
drudgery, when you use the "site relative" approach. 

Sure, you could  keep your systems on separate LANs that can't "see" each
other, or do some fancy DNS manipulations and redirections so you can have
duplicate names on different host machines. This latter notion isn't all
that uncommon, Network Address Translation (NAT) has lot's of appropriate
uses, but in this case it would just make your life unneccesarily more
complicated than it needs to be.

I've moved data from my desktop Zope (Win '95), to a testing host (NT), and
finally to Sun Solaris, without having to change anything! Don't ask why
we're not using Linux, it makes me very grumpy . . .

Later,
Jerry S.