[Zope] Re:GoLive

[Fred Yankowski]

On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 08:31:09AM -0600, Christopher J. Kucera wrote:
> That should be pretty easy . . .  Zope will let you add objects that
> have dots in the titles, so just put a method "index_html" in the
> root folder which has the following line:
> 
>   <dtml-var index.html>

That obvious solution fails in some cases.  It failed for me the very
first time I needed it, when I tried to integrate web pages created by
the Web Studio tool into a larger Zope website.  Web Studio (ack,
phooey) creates a main index.html that uses Javascript to redirect to
another page that acts as the real entry point.  That Javascript code
gets confused when loaded via <dtml-var index.html> as above.  I
resorted to doing the following instead:

	 <dtml-call "RESPONSE.redirect(URL1 + '/index.html')">

So now it takes two redirects to get to the real page, darn it.  The
above _could_ redirect straight to the real entry page, but exact
knowledge of which page that is belongs to the subsite, not in my
code.  And it turns out that the subsite _has_ changed its entry page
since I set up the above code.

With Zope, simple things are easy, but slightly complex things tend to
be hard.   It's a weird learning/technology curve and I sure hope it
flattens out soon...
I've done a lot of website programming in PHP, Java, Perl, and
AOLserver/Tcl  -- none of those seem to have Zope's complexity at the
point of creating simple database-backed websites.  Zope doesn't even
have a decent self-registering user login system out of beta yet.
Sheesh.

-- 
Fred Yankowski           fred@OntoSys.com      tel: +1.630.879.1312
Principal Consultant     www.OntoSys.com       fax: +1.630.879.1370
OntoSys, Inc             38W242 Deerpath Rd, Batavia, IL 60510, USA