[Zope] Am I getting the idea correctly?

[Richard Folwell]

You can use whatever GUI type tools you currently use to create your web pages to use with Zope.
This will not make the best use of Zope, but it will work.  Zope makes available an FTP interface to
its internal database structure, so it is possible to use it more or less exactly as you would with
a standard Unix based web serving system.

My girlfriend is a fledging webbie, and her experience is interesting.  She started off being
completely gung-ho about GUI-based tools, but now prefers to use tools that let her work directly
with the HTML.

If you try to use Zope in the same way as a conventional simple web server then you will probably be
underwhelmed - it will work, but no better/worse than the more usual ways of doing this.  It
definitely pays to play with it a bit, and to try out a number of products.  I had been studiously
ignoring ZCatalog until recently when I needed to change the behaviour of a supplied product
(something to provide threaded discussions).  What would have been significant work with other
systems turned out to be trivial in Zope (once I had worked out how to do it :-).

Richard

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But here's what worries me about Zope: it looks I will do a whole lot of typing and get caught up in
the syntax and repetitive nature of things like <dtml-var ------> and <dtml-this -----> and
<dtml-that ----- >. OK, so it's not made for the faint-of-heart at this point - I can handle that.
But I also am not an HTML maven, and it looks like I need to have full HTML expertise to make this
work also. GUI tools take the drudge out of <a href="something">something and <h2>this is a
heading</h2> pretty well, but I don't see how to get out of this stuff with Zope, especially since
it looks like everything is stored internally in a data file that I can't access from the outside.

Am I correct? Or is there help on the horizon for those of us who have no graphic design skills and
<shudder> actually believe there's a place for GUI-based tools?

Thanks for any light you might shed on this subject for me -

-Frank