[Zope] Beginners questions

[Tino Wildenhain]

Hi Edward,

Edward Comber schrieb:
> 1) Is the Zope Book available in downloadable HTML form?

Yes, but not in archive form I fear. You would use
a tool like wget or pavuk. There are some older versions
available as pdf iirc. Just follow the links.

> 2) Can I (and are there reasons why I should not) get Zserver to work on
> Port 80. I don't want to confuse my users.

Its perfectly possible when there is nothing already running on
that port and you start zope as admin/root to have access
to port numbers below 1024.
Most people however feel more comfortable to use apache, pond
or squid as proxy, loadbalancer and sanetizer in front of Zope.
You can configure Zserver to listen on any port and any interface
you want. (There are several howtos and links from the
mailingliste)


> 3) ZPT vs DHTML. Straight away I am confused by this, and I need to know
> which to focus my attention on. I get the impression that the preferred
> order is ZPT, DHTML Methods, DHTML Templates. I came to Zope from
> programming in Python, if that helps. My plan is to start with ZPT - is that
> correct?

I think you refer to DTML. DHTML is a complete different beast, it
just sounds similar :-)
Python is good. I'd even say perfect for beginning.
You should experiment with the "Python Script" objects,
which you can understand as methods at the folder they
are created in. You can return arbitrary complex
nested datastructures (often lists with dictionaries in them)
from these methods - you can test them separately to see
if output matches what you want and then later include
these calls in ZPT. No need for DTML unless you want to
use ZSQL-Methods which require some knowledge in DTML.

> 4) Is here a more appropriate place to ask beginners questions?

Here is perfect.

Regards
Tino Wildenhain