[Zope-CMF] Compound elements

[Jon Edwards]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Erik Lange [mailto:erik@mmmanager.org]

> Jon, is what you're looking for not this; a way to incorporate compound
> documents in a new compositions, without re-composing the
> components in the
> originally compound documents ?

Errr... yes and no! :-)

As Seb has said, it should be possible to include compound documents in
other compound documents - not too hard for viewing, but tricky to know how
to handle things like editing and workflow.

So, you could build up a page by creating a compound document and then
pulling other documents/objects into it. But to build a whole site like that
would be very repetitive and time-consuming. So, the idea is you build your
overall layout-template once (including, header, footer, menu widgets, etc),
with a gap in the middle where the content goes.

Then you setup your site structure and create local compound documents,
which call the layout-template and slot themselves into the gap. In other
words, no matter which "film" you click on, it always wraps itself in the
same "Cinema", without you needing to rebuild the Cinema every time you
create a new film :-)

Well, that's the way we're doing it in our CMS. I just wanted to check if
others were taking a similar approach, so that there might be some
compatibility.

> I believe this scenario can be transferred directly to written documents,
> were an author might want to present his work in a certain way, as well as
> it gets wrapped in a portals header/footer/(STYLE)...

I think this is a different (though equally valid) discussion? In our
system, the author of a document would only be able to pick
styles/colours/formats that have been defined for the whole site (to keep
consistency). You can set different page-layouts and stylesheets at the
folder/organisation level, but not at the individual document level. Perhaps
in your system your users need more fine-grained local control?

Hope that makes sense,

Cheers, Jon