[Zope] Can Zope Do....?

[bruno modulix]

Alan Snyder wrote:
> I'm in love with zope from what i've seen of this Elvis Sightings
> interactive demo. It's so friggin' easy to build functionalities into
> pages. Holy smokes!!
> 
> Before I go further with this, I have some questions...
> 
> 1) I am creating all of these pages through the zope manager interface
> which is great, but is it possible, and if so how, to do what I'm
> doing here and update a client remotely through something like a CVS
> or some pre-packaged zope update? Is it a matter of just copying files
> and such from a folder (like the parent elvis sightings folder), or do
> i need to grab stuff from different zope config areas and work it.
> Bottom line - is there any synchronization or update mechanisms
> available that let me develop and fix sites locally and effect those
> changes on a remote server, i.e. at a client?

Zope has some webdav support but I never tried to use it. There are also 
file-system based components that you can manage like any other file. 
And there's ZopeExternalEditor that let you edit (some) Zope objects 
with a local editor (needs some install on the client). When it comes to 
Products and External Methods, they are FS based.

I've also written some 'upload files and update datas' scripts for Zope, 
and that works quite fine - just need to know a bit of Zope's internals. 
And finally, anything you do TTW can be done programmaticaly as long as 
you can connect to your server. Search zope.org for zope debugging, zope 
unit-testing and ZEO, you'll find some usefull informations (but first 
learn a bit more about Zope architecture, the ZODB etc).

> 2) I saw in one of the chapters that each page can reference a
> template (like standard_template.something)... This looks really cool
> for giving a similar layout to pages in a "folder". Can sub-folder
> templates "over-ride" parent folder templates. In other words, if i
> copy the "standard_template" file to a sub folder and slightly modify
> it will that version be picked up by those folder's pages, or will the
> parent version be used?

depends on how you access the template, but if you use context 
acquisition (ie : access object with 'here/my_object_id' (tales path 
expression) or 'context.my_object_id' (python), just put a different 
template with the same name in the sub-folder and you're done. The 
acquisition mechanism is one of Zope's greatest difficulty *and* strength.

> 3) What are the items in that drop down list of things in the upper
> right corner of every folder called? It has stuff like "DTML Document,
> Mai Host..." Are those "products"? 

Yes.

> Where can I find more of those.
> They're wonderful. 

zope.org is good place to start. Some of my favorites are EpozDocument, 
mxmRelation and Reference, but there are many other pretty useful 
things. When it comes to developping with Zope, forget about dtml and 
zclasses and go for PageTemplates and Products.

> Also - how hard are they to install at a client?

untar the tarball in the Product directory, restart Zope and you're done 
(unless there are some bugs or missing dependencies...)

> What mechanisms are available for producing "install scripts" for
> clients who want to use the stuff I build?

I'll leave this to other - since we hosts our Zope applications, I never 
thought of deployment issues.

-- 
Bruno Desthuilliers - Analyste-programmeur
bruno at modulix.org
www.modulix.com