[Zope-CMF] Re: Plone Speed

Shane Hathaway shane@zope.com
Wed, 15 May 2002 16:10:42 -0400


Chris Withers wrote:
> alan runyan wrote:
> 
>>what do you mean 'used for categorisation' ?
>>we have broken our 'skin path elements' into sensible structures. 
> 
> 
> Yeah, you categorised them ;-)
> 
> This is not what the skins tool was designed for. The skins tool was designed to let the
> user select different looks & feels. Hence the ordering/stacking/onion skin effect which
> is not doing you any favours in your use of it...

The skins tool was designed with a lot of flexibility in mind, to let 
people try out different ways of skinning a site until we figure out 
what the right way is.  The way CMFDefault structures skins is not the 
only way, nor necessarily the right way.

I think we've improved the scheme for Zope 3.  Now we should see what we 
can port back to CMF.

The first difference is that CMF currently forces a skin layer to 
correspond to a directory, while Zope 3 will allow a layer to be 
composed of components from multiple locations.  The advantage is that 
there will be no need to reconfigure skins every time you install a product.

The second difference is that Zope 3 will allow you to put templates and 
scripts together in view components.  This should be easier to work with.

Finally, Zope 3 won't use implicit acquisition to get skin methods. 
Traversing a URL will involve stepping through views, and views will be 
registered against interfaces.  This is radically different from Zope 2 
/ CMF. :-)

So, today we can say that although grouping is good, the current skins 
tool doesn't encourage the right kind of grouping.  So you're usually 
better off just putting all your skin methods in one layer. :-)

Shane