[Zope-Coders] Making index_html a PageTemplate

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Hello fellow Zope coders,

I posted this to zope-dev yesterday but nobody seems to be interested 
there, so I'll bug you with my idea:

I have been hanging around #zope on IRC a lot recently and noticed that
a lot of newbies ask a lot of DTML questions. I tried to answer their
questions but I always pointed them to ZPT in the end. I was amazed that
the majority had never heard of ZPT or thought that their problem could
only be solved with DTML.

I've been emailing with Chris McDonough (see out thread on the ZDP
mailinglist) and we found that the following two reasons might be
responsible to this:

   a) newbies, esp. scripters, like to play around without reading docs

   b) the tutorial is grossly out of date

a) seems is a common behaviour which we cannot change. We can, however,
change what newbies find on their path of trial and error. I think a big
false symbol is that index_html is still a DTML Method. Everybody with
some knowledge of web suite building knows what a index.html is so they
will most likely look at that object named index_html. They see that it
is a DTML Method so they'll say "Aha! HTML in Zope is done with DTML
Methods".

Therefore, I propose to make index_html (and while we're at it, 
standard_error_message, too) a PageTemplate for 2.7. Since this change 
would not affect the framework at all, it should not interfere with the 
release schedule for 2.7. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thoughts?

Phil