[Zope] Page Templates are great, but...

Sun, 2 Jun 2002 01:36:15 +0300

I like page templates because they permit uncomplicated
cooperation with designers who don't know DTML and/or
use drag-and-drop composers. Newbie I am, however, I see
a few problems here, and I hope they stem from my ignorance.

1.) Can page templates be "modularized"?
DTML is great for assembling pages from re-usable blocks,
i.e. dtml_standard_header, dtml_standard_footer. 
I have not found an equivalent facility for page templates.
Is there any?

2.) Symbols
How am I supposed to work with symbolic information like
table width? Of course, I'm free to create python-functions
which pull the raw figures from a config-file or db, but
having a separate function for each of the dozens of symbols
I would need will give me carpal tunnel syndrome.

3.) Dynamic pages
This is a more generic newbie question, since it is not
confined to the realms of page templates. Let's say my site
sports a uniform layout for hundreds of used-car ads.
Each ad gets its own page which content is pulled from a
data-base on the fly. This content is wrapped into identical
hooks for banner ads, a header, footer and navigation bar.
Without Zope one sets up a table of content with a link
to each ad; each link calls a cgi-script with some id for
the data-base in the QUERY_STRING. This requires the script
to assemble the page, send the cgi-ahoy (content-type: text/blabla)
and the <html> for the page. Is there a Zope-ish way to do
this? I have not even found a way to access a page template
from a script for reading. The data for Zope-objects seems
to be pickled in files.db. 

Thanks 
page

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