[Zope] "Define Permissions" in ZMI Products

[Jeff Gentry]

> Stop right there ;-)
> Go back to external products, they're the right way to do this stuff.
> ZMI-based products (aka ZClasses) are now deprecated and will finally be 
> going away in Zope 2.10...

Fair enough then. :)  That raises two followup questions for me.

a) One of the reasons I was doing this in ZMI (other than it is just
mainly just a few very short bits of python) was that the people setting
this up will be uploading a folder of HTML files via WebDAV or whatever
into the product folder.  These HTML files will be what the end users are
actually interacting with, although they call into the python code.  This
worked via the ZMI as a form would declare its action as 'foo', and 'foo'
would be found one level up in the Product's main directory.

In the past when I've worked with external products, all of my template,
dtml, html, etc files have already been predefined and I've explicitly
declared them in my code.  for instance, to use a dtml file I would say
something like:
blah = DTMLFile('dtml/blah', globals())

And then if function 'foo' had 'return blah', it would return that page on
the client end.  Here, I don't know what the files are ahead of time, and
if I have 'foo' return dtml/blah.dtml it doesn't render properly (as in it
renders it purely as text).  

So other than me once again just not doing things the way I was trying to
do them :), is there a good way to set this up?

And:

b) What's the best way besides the mailing list to stay up to date with a
lot of this stuff.  I ask because when I look at Plope I see a link to the
2.7 Zope Book.  When I try to find a copy of the Zope Developer Guide it
points me to the 2.4 version.  Most of what I've learned comes from those
two guides and looking at other products - but then I'll end up seeing
this or that which I picked up from XYZ product is "the wrong way to do
it now", yet I'm not sure where the appropriate documentation for "the
right way to do it now" would be if a lot of the docs I find on zope.org
and other places are pointing to outdated techniques and such.

Thanks again
-J