[Zope] Dreamweaver UltraDev

[Chris Withers]

> In that case it sounds like Dreamweaver Ultradev will work also...

Not necessarily ;-)

> Would you care to explain precisely _how_ you use Dreamweaver with Zope at
> present ?

Sure...

Our content editors use Dreamweaver 3 to edit Zope DTML documents using
Dreamweaver's ability to edit sites using FTP. Zope provides a wonderful
FTP server (usually on port 8021) giving secure access to the ZODB's
contents in a way that behaves like a filesystem accesses through FTP.
DTML Methods and Documents (and anything derived from them, such as Wiki
pages) can be downloaded and edited... other objects can't, but Zope
returns a 550 error, which is the same as you'd get if you didn't have
the neccessary privileges to access a file, so Dreamweaver doesnt'
whinge too much.

-Why DTML Documents?

Well, because they're only editing content and we don't want them
messing with any DTML.
By giving the dtml documents ids which end in .html, Dreamweaver on the
PC is quite happy to edit them as HTML. And because Dreamweaver is kind
enough to leave alone tags it doesn't know about, you can leave
<dtml-var standard_html_header> and the footer in, although you might
have to be a bit more careful with other embedded DTML.

-But how do you do index_html then?

We use a very cunning DTML method index_html:
<dtml-var index.html>

And then have a normal index.html DTML document.

-So, what are your gripes then?

Well, Dreamweaver (on the PC) is f$%^ing stupid in the way it handles
extenion-less files: it won't let you edit them. If it just treated them
as text, then you could edit DTML methods in the HTML source window.
That said, this is qutie a cool 'feature': we can limti what our content
editors can screw up by not giving important stuf a .html extension...

A combination of Zope/Dreamweaver stupidity (I haven't actually figured
out who is to blame... ;-)
means that you have to define users who are going to edit stuff with
Dreamweaver in the root of your Zope object store and then give them
local roles appropriate to the actual access they need.

Oh, and Dreamweaver is a lumbering beast of an application in terms of
needing huge amounts of screen space and memory. I tend to stick to
EMACS, which works fine on NT, has a python mode (I would break down and
cry with joy if someone did a DTML minor mode) and lets me edit DTML
documents, methods and the like to my hearts content: lovely copy &
paste, text searching, etc...

Hope all this helps :-)

Chris

> ..and how it relates to this Richard Folwell's comment:
> Thursday, May 11, 2000 3:23 AM, Richard Folwell wrote: <richard@folwell.com>
> > It looks like a code generation system, in which case it will have
> problems with Zope, due to the
> > content being held in an object database.  All the mentioned supported
> systems use text files for
> > their sources.

Not sure what this is waffling about, is the whole message available
anywhere?

PS: Given that Dreamweaver is entirely written in XML and javascript,
someone should really hack it to pieces and make it into a decent Zope
(XML-RPC?) client ;-)