I'm looking for suggestions about how to manage a Zope website that
hosts some subsites created by tools outside of Zope. Here's the
situation.
I'm working on a community website (batavians.org) for a small city
(Batavia, IL) where I want to allow various non-profit community
organizations to manage their own subsites. But the very first test
case is proving to be a problem because the manager of the subsite is
using web page development tools that seem to make it hard to
integrate their subsite with the rest of the site. They can FTP their
files up to the Zope server (which I configured to use port 21 for
FTP) and their work is accessible just fine given a small "glue"
index_html object that bridges to their internal main page. But I got
blocked when I tried to add a standard page footer onto their pages.
Actually, I was able to add a dtml-var element to pull in a standard
footer via acquisition and that works, but the manager of the
sub-website has no way to pull that change back to her working version
of the subsite. It seems that the lightweight "Web Studio 2.0" tool
she's using has no FTP-download function at all. Not only that, it
has no way to view/edit HTML at all! It's only possible to edit using
a WYSIWYG design view (AFAICT). So she can't merge in the change even
if I tell her exactly the HTML code to add.
OK, this problem is largely the result of the crappy web-design tool
she's using, but I really have no control over that. The subsite
manage/author doesn't know HTML and would be completely helpless with
Zope's "through the web" editing interface. A better tool such as
Dreamweaver would at least allow her to download files and/or edit
HTML directly, but that's moot in this case. Even with Dreamweaver I
think the DTML tags would be invisible and hard for a non-programmer
to deal with. (Not only that, Dreamweaver refuses to open files that
don't have an extension, so it won't open index_html for example.)
So what alternatives do I have? Is there some way that I can set up a
filter such that every page of her subsite goes through the filter
before being sent out to the browser, allowing me to tack on a page
footer on those pages? I'm sure Zope has such a mechanism, but I
don't know where to look. Even with such a filter I'm not keen about
having to parse her pages (which are/should-be each a complete HTML
document) in order to insert a footer line in the right place. What
other schemes should I consider?
--
Fred Yankowski [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel: +1.630.879.1312
Principal Consultant www.OntoSys.com fax: +1.630.879.1370
OntoSys, Inc 38W242 Deerpath Rd, Batavia, IL 60510, USA
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