Re: [Zope] Am I getting the idea correctly?

[Andy McKay]

You still have to write dtml by hand, but you could say Dreamweaver to connect via FTP to Zope. You can then edit the documents in html. Or use you favorite WSYIWYG and ftp / cut and paste them in.   For a tool that includes all the dtml check out the one day it might be ready - Zope Studio.   ----- Original Message ----- From: Frank Isaacs To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, July 08, 2000 2:37 PM Subject: [Zope] Am I getting the idea correctly? I'm so new to Zope that I can barely even spell it. But I'm about to spend some time and effort getting proficient with something that enables dynamic, database-connected (and database-updateable) content on web sites so I can sell it to clients, and the appeal of Zope is overwhelming in this arena.   I am a very proficient PowerBuilder programmer, but Sybase's offerings are cumbersome and somewhat expensive. I am well versed in many of Microsoft's products, particularly VBA for its Office products, but I worry greatly about using anything from Microsoft because it's hard to know when I'll run into a "gotcha" that I'll curse myself for later on. Cold Fusion and other products seem a happy medium but the CF server piece is about $5k, and some others are more expensive.   But here's what worries me about Zope: it looks I will do a whole lot of typing and get caught up in the syntax and repetitive nature of things like <dtml-var ------> and <dtml-this -----> and <dtml-that ----- >. OK, so it's not made for the faint-of-heart at this point - I can handle that. But I also am not an HTML maven, and it looks like I need to have full HTML expertise to make this work also. GUI tools take the drudge out of <a href="something">something and <h2>this is a heading</h2> pretty well, but I don't see how to get out of this stuff with Zope, especially since it looks like everything is stored internally in a data file that I can't access from the outside.   Am I correct? Or is there help on the horizon for those of us who have no graphic design skills and <shudder> actually believe there's a place for GUI-based tools?   Thanks for any light you might shed on this subject for me -   -Frank