[Zope] ZPT help

Thu Aug 28 12:51:41 EDT 2003

On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 09:14:53AM -0500, Albert Chin wrote:
> I just set up Zope 2.6.1 and am trying to migrate a static web site to
> it. The site has some navigation links on the right and across the
> top. The links to the right are different depending on the page
> content. The links across the top are always the same.
> 
> Basic tree structure is:
>   www.foo.com/
>   www.foo.com/company-info/
>   www.foo.com/company-info/contact
>   www.foo.com/company-info/history
>   www.foo.com/products/
>   www.foo.com/products/product-1
>   www.foo.com/products/product-2
>   www.foo.com/products/product-3
>   www.foo.com/projects/project-1
>   www.foo.com/projects/project-2
>   www.foo.com/projects/project-3
> 
> The "contact" and "history" links appear to the right on the
> "company-info" page. The "product-1", "product-2", and "product-3"
> links appear to the right on the "products" page, etc.
> 
> The "company-info", "products", and "projects" links would appear
> across the top.
> 
> Is it possible to have one ZPT template which provides dynamic content
> based on the URL?

Normally this is done by using acquisition. There's a lot of variants,
but my favorite ways to solve this kind of problem are 

A) CMF (but that's pretty involved, and actually your specific request is 
not trivial for a newbie in the stock CMF setup); or 

B) use a one-folder-per-page paradigm. This is quite flexible, simple, 
and should be easy to teach to a content administrator.

So, assuming the latter, in your root folder, you set up an index_html 
template that looks a bit like this (simplified):

<!-- begin template -->
<div>
  <!-- common top-nav links go here -->
</div>

<div tal:content="structure here/content">
  The actual page content will be rendered here
</div>

<div metal:use-macro="here/right_nav/macros/main">
  This will be replaced with the right nav macro which you
  can override per folder.
</div>

Now, create your products and company-info folders.
In each folder, create a document (can be a ZPT, a DTML
method, or any other suitable object) called "content".
This will be the content that gets placed in the middle of the
index_html in each folder.

Now create the right nav for the products/ folder.
To do this, just create a ZPT called products/right_nav.
It should look something like:

<!-- begin template -->
<html>
<body>
<div metal:define-macro="main">
  <a href="/products/product-1"> Product 1 </a>
  ...
</div>
</body>
</html>
<!-- end template -->

Do the same in the company-info folder.
You'll need a default right_nav in the root folder, too.

Presto, your framework is done. Now you can create the individual
leaf pages. To do so, simply:

1) create a folder, e.g. products/product-1
2) in this folder, create an object named "content"

The reason I'd use the tal:content="structure ..." idiom for
the central content, rather than using a METAL macro, is that
it's simpler and more flexible for the content manager.
When creating or editing content, they only have to create an
object named "content" in the appropriate folder; it doesn't matter
if it's a ZPT or a DTML method, and they don't have to remember
the important detail of using metal:define-macro.
You could do the same for the right_nav but in that case I figure
it'll be managed by a more zope-savvy person who might like to take
advantage of some of METAL's nice features.

One gotcha with this approach: You might want to be careful how 
you set up your ZCatalog, assuming that you use one; 
you probably don't really want it to return lots of links to 
things named "content". There are ways, should
you need to deal with this...

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
Look! Up in the sky! It's MY BITCH MEGA!
(random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)