[Zope] Am I getting the idea correctly?

[Henny van der Linde]

Hi,

>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.

I've been there.
Before I came across Zope I builded websites with Frontpage and later on
with Dreamweaver (I still do in certain cases). Dropping these kind of pure
document oriented sites in Zope is possible but then you are missing the
point of Zope. Zope requires another way of thinking about websites.
A real GUI working with Zope isn't there yet. I don't think that's a real
problem. Zope forces you often to go to  nitty gritty details of HTML
programming. I think that's a good thing (for me). GUI tools tend to make
you very lazy and often produce horrible HTML (for example Frontpage). In my
opinion you can't be a serious website builder without extensive knowledge
about HTML. With Zope or another platform.
That said. You can use Dreamweaver's FTP fascilities to edit
documents/methods in Zope. However I don't think that that is very useful (I
have never tried this) because Dreamweaver is document oriented and is not
aware of your object design/dependecies in the ZODB (the Zope Object
Database).
I still use Dreamweaver and Fireworks in combination with Zope however. My
aproach is: designing the thing in Fireworks (with slices), exporting from
Fireworks to Dreamweaver. Then using the HTML result in Dreamweaver for
designing/programming my DTML methods (copy/paste)

Henny van der Linde
Leiden University.