[slinkp23@yahoo.com: [Zope] Re: [Zope-CMF] ZPT and CMF]

Nat Harari nat@interactivehq.org
Wed, 3 Oct 2001 11:08:44 -0400


Great. :)

Well, thanks! :) I'd love CMFDecor, sure. Could you email it to me sometime today, please? Yep...I don't really know what CVS is, I
guess. I thought CVS was the old CMF project so...no clue what you mean by that. :)

Argh. I guess I'll just tell them that I can't have it done by monday then and give myself some time. I guess it doesn't matter all
that much since I already told them that even if the portal is not done, they can still upload content into the database, which will
take them several days at the very least. :)

I will be using blark, of course. Best damned product out there and Jeff is just a damned cool guy. :) I guess I can make the right
and left sidebars behave and look the way I want with Blark, in a way.  I already posted on netkook about that and he gave me a few
pointers about the right side bar. Customizing the left one will be a little bit harder, I would imagine, as it is based in CMF and
not blark....I think. I'm not sure about that, but I am not a complete idiot, of course. :)

Oh, yes...I *do* know HTML but I don't know DTML. And while DTML is a set of easy tags and all that, it isn't so easy when you are
moving tags around whose function you are not sure of. I could learn DTML in a week or two, of course, and I did the Elvis and Zoo
tutorials (as well as the CMF tutorial building the site for the students), but I'm sure that reading that code in CMF, not just a
tutorial page, will be somehow a little different. :)

Okay, anyway, I'd love CMF decor and I can try it out. Sure. I'd love that. Yep. :)

I will stick with Zope. The last thing I want to do is try a visual ASP studio crap program for a crappy server. :P Zope *is*
awesome, even if it isn't "out of the box" yet. I do agree with Erik that it is close, however. With Zope, CMF, and Blark or
Squishdot, you can easily set up a great interactive site without doing much customizing at all. Of course, the problem I have with
it so far is that if you want it to look different than the default, you're gonna have problems. I'll try to work on that. :)

BTW, as a designer - and I know that you guys don't know me from the next guy in the street but - if I can help in any way at all, I
would love to. :) Maybe I can make some skins later on after this project is done, after I learn how, and give them to the
community? Or maybe make some template design pages? Any way that I can help out, please tell me. :)


Thanks again and waiting for your email,

Nat. :)


-----Original Message-----
From: zope-cmf-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-cmf-admin@zope.org]On Behalf
Of Paul Winkler
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 5:05 PM
To: zope-cmf@zope.org
Subject: [slinkp23@yahoo.com: [Zope] Re: [Zope-CMF] ZPT and CMF]


----- Forwarded message from Paul Winkler <slinkp23@yahoo.com> -----

Subject: [Zope] Re: [Zope-CMF] ZPT and CMF
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 17:55:25 -0400
From: Paul Winkler <slinkp23@yahoo.com>
To: Nat Harari <nat@interactivehq.org>
Cc: zope@zope.org

On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 03:27:13PM -0400, Nat Harari wrote:
> But I am a designer, foremost. I'm not a coder.

Meaning what? Can you at least read html and write html by hand?  If
not, you're going to have a very hard time getting this stuff to work.

> And reading lines of code doesn't explain much to me at all. I was hoping that with
> WebDAV, I wouldn't really have to learn much code at all.

> http://www.somethingwonderful.com/misc/aim4.jpg
> That is a mock-up of
> what I am trying to make, using Zope, CMF, and Blark. That is what I
> have to have ready by Monday.

Yeeow. That's not much time!

> It isn't all that hard to create in Dreamweaver, but I'll be damned
> if I understand how to make it work with Zope without some sort of
> visual tutorial that a newbie like myself can learn. As you can see,
> it uses most everything that Zope/CMF/Blark uses, and almost exactly
> in the same format. I just need to know how to change some things -
> like move them around

OK, that *might* work. But I think it will be very hard. I honestly
don't know if you're ready to pull this off.

ZPT is supposed to make it easier for a site designer to design stuff
without caring how it works, while a site developer makes it work
without caring how it looks. It doesn't magically enable you to avoid
needing a developer if you need a developer.

But CMF is supposed to let you set up a portal without being much of a
developer. So in theory, it's possible to do what you want. In
practice, CMF and ZPT have not been used together until recently and
there just isn't any documentation of the sort you're looking
for. You'll be pioneering a new technique, travelling in a hurry
without a road map. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes.

If you can look at a demo CMF site and imagine what you want each part
to say, that's helpful. If you want something to *behave* slightly
differently than how it does in CMF... that takes code.

So here's what I suggest. It might be a long shot, but it might be
worth a try.

You need to customize a CMF skin. Skins exist to make it easier to
change the look of a CMF site. Partly so users can select their
favorite skin, but partly also to make it easier for you and me to
create a new look.

Unfortunately, what you need is a ZPT skin, and CMF doesn't come with
one by default. You need the CMFDecor product.

And that brings up another problem... You can currently only get the
CMFDecor product (as far as I can tell) from CVS. You can browse it at
cvs.zope.org, but to download you'll need a cvs program. Never heard
of CVS? I suspect you don't have time for that now. Ask me and I'll
mail you a copy of CMFDecor.

Once you have CMFDecor in your zope Products directory,
follow these instructions:
http://cmf.zope.org/Members/teyc/skinPageTemplate/view

That will set you up with all the skin ZPT files on your filesystem,
so you can edit them there and not have to deal with WebDav or FTP or
whatever. Changes you make should appear on the running zope site. I
think.

Be careful to keep an unmodified copy of CMFDecor around in case you
screw something up by accident.

Now, on the filesystem, look around in CMFDecor/skins. In particular,
look in zpt_content, zpt_control, and zpt_generic. Most things you
want are probably in zpt_generic.

For example, main_template.pt is probably the one you care the most
about. It changes how everything else looks: where the menus go and
what they look like, etc. This template also makes use of a css
stylesheet, zpt_stylesheet.css.

actions_box.zpt is the box that shows your user name and any actions
the user can take on the current page, like logging out, changing your
preferences, etc.

index_html.pt is the portal home page.

I haven't figured out all the rest yet - I'm just looking at this
stuff now.

It's important to understand that with Page Templates, an individual
page might not look like much when you edit it directly, but when you
see it on a running Zope site it's getting wrapped in other templates
(usually, in this case, main_template.pt). For example, if you look at
index_html.pt directly in a browser, it doesn't look like much of
anything. Hell, it's only 26 lines long. But it uses main_template,
and then it displays the title of your portal, and the description you
gave when you set up the portal, and then inserts news_box.

If you can't manage to figure out which files correspond to which
parts of the interface, you're f*cked I'm afraid. CMF is big, the ZPT
skin is new, and there's not really any map that I know of that
explains what it all does. You have to find out by reading the .pt
files.

So with any luck, you might be able to edit these templates in
Dreamweaver and move things around on the page without breaking your
portal. We can hope.

--
................    paul winkler   ................
 custom calendars:   http://www.calendargalaxy.com
   A member of ARMS:   http://www.reacharms.com
        home page:  http://www.slinkp.com


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................    paul winkler   ................
 custom calendars:   http://www.calendargalaxy.com
   A member of ARMS:   http://www.reacharms.com
        home page:  http://www.slinkp.com

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