[Zope] zpt, metal and missing content objects (bit long)

[Tim Hicks]

All,

just thought I'd post a follow-up to my previous rants/deliberations
regarding content objects and zpts.

Thanks to Jochen and Paul pointing me in the direction of 'Folders', I now
seem to have a rather easy to use, flexible and manageable site setup.  I
was sceptical about using Folders at first as I thought they'd:

o  confuse my users - "so the folders are the web pages??!!";

o  clutter the ZMI - every content object appearing as a leaf in the
left-hand tree;

o  be unwieldy to use within the ZMI due to them not having textareas for
editing (without going into the 'Properties' tab).

I think I still stand by these problems, but they are easily circumvented by
using custom management screens to take out some of the more confusing
aspects of the setup.  This is what I've done.

>From reading the blurb about 'Kubes', I think I've essentially implemented a
poor-man's version.  Instead of defining a new class in a product
(non-standard products were not available to me for this project remember),
I simply wrote custom management methods (as python scripts) that
added/edited properties to allow me to distinguish between certain object
types as I needed.

An unexpected added bonus was the easy way I can switch from content being
just a text property (i.e. static html), to dynamically scripted using
zpt/dtml/whatever.  All I need to do is define a subobject on my folder
(with the name I've chosen for content - 'content').  The index_html
acquired from the site root simply inserts the rendered result of the
context's 'content' attribute and all works nicely.

The only thing I'm missing now is catalogawareness, although I suppose I
could even hack that functionality into my customised edit methods.  I'm a
little leery of this approach as any time people use the ZMI (and some
inevitably will at some stage), the catalog becomes out of sync.  It just
feels too hacky.

Anyway, I'm off to install 'Kubes', figure out how to make them
catalogaware, figure out if their content can be easily turned into scripts
and double check that they solve the ZMI issues in this sort of setup.

For now though, I'm a happy bunny.  I've got a solution that I like where
before, things were looking a little dicey.

cheers,

tim