[Zope-CMF] Compound elements

[Jon Edwards]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Seb Bacon [mailto:seb@jamkit.com]

> A good question.  As I understand it, your solution is to provide a
> set of structural layouts, into which content components can be placed
> at will.  The page authoring process goes:
>
>  - pick a layout (top bar, left nav, main area)
>  - select content for each layout component (text widget -> top bar,
>    image -> main area)
>  - edit content components

Yea, sorta! I've changed it now so that when a "normal" user adds a page, it
just inherits the same page-layout settings from higher up the hierarchy -
only high-level users can change the page-layout settings locally...
hopefully that gives the best of both worlds ;-)

But the point I was (clumsily) trying to make is that you treat a "compound
document" as the "content" part of the page - the bit in the middle, not
including the surrounding headers, footers, navbars, etc. - which I think
was also the idea behind the Composite Proposal. The benefit being,
hopefully, that if everyone uses that approach, there will be a possibility
to interchange between different systems?

> I think the best way of thinking about what a templating system should
> be capable of TTW is to realise that there are two distinct roles
> here: one is the template developer, the other is the site author.
> In our situation, we are the site developers, and the clients are the
> site authors, and we are happy keeping things that way.

True, but I think there is also a halfway-house for small organisations,
where they can select an existing template, then add their logo, customise
colours, fonts etc... a bit like the "Homepage Builders" that many ISPs
offer (but with less animated GIFs! ;-)

> On the other hand, a TTW template authoring process is obviously
> necessary in a number of situations.  In this case, there are two
> problems: creating the structural container, and creating the
> components.  I think you have to offer the template developer the
> ability to create new components by combining together other
> components, since what constitutes a logical unit varies from problem
> to problem.

I need to play with ZPT, but perhaps if you created several layout templates
with ZPT, users could pick the "best fit", then customise the look of it via
Dreamweaver or GoLive?

Cheers, Jon