[Zope] Learning Zope

Ethan Fremen mindlace@majordomo.net
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 21:19:17 +0100


"James W. Howe" wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to come up to speed on Zope and one idea I have is to take a
> small website that I worked on and put it into Zope.  Does anybody have any
> tips on a good way to "zopeify" an existing website?

You can use fsimport.py to import the old site to zope.  I haven't seen
it in the new site, but it can be found at http://www.zope.org:8080
along with instructions.  It does work in Zope 2.0.1.

>  What I would like to
> be able to do is get the site working from within Zope and then spend some
> time refactoring the site to take better take advantage of Zope's
> capabilities.  Unfortunately I don't have a good model on how to reorganize
> things to better fit the Zope environment.  I would be glad to hear any
> tips or ideas on good ways to organize a Zope web site.

I'm still a neophyte Zopista (Zopisto?), but here goes:

Well... Your hierarchy should go from global to specific. all global
things should live in the root folder (or as a product), and areas that
are different should be in their own folder.

use standard_html_header and standard_html_footer in a way that allow
them to automatically change for the context (so that areas are
different, but still globally "branded").

I do this by having a line:  <dtml-if local_header><dtml-var
local_header></dtml-if> after the things I specify in
standard_html_header.

If you have stylesheets, you can do the same-  I have a css_sheet in the
root directory (called by standard_html_header) that uses local_style
the same way local_header is used.

I find this is a great way to leverage acquisition.  A section can have
a local_style, and then be overridden by a subfolder's local_style. 
Same with local_header.

You can also do this for any images you call using <dtml-var> in
standard_html_header.

-- 
     mindlace
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