[Zope] Many Zope questions

John Goerzen jgoerzen@complete.org
03 Sep 1999 11:45:24 -0500


Hi,

I'm just new to Zope, and have some questions both on documentation
and on overall architecture.

First, despite reading the descriptions in the documentation, I still
don't understand the difference between a DTML Method and a DTML
Document, save that documents (apparently?) have their own properties
(variables?)  When should I use one, when should I use the other, etc?

Next question.  I'm wanting to take a site, say http://www.aclug.org/
that I currently maintain with a set of m4 macros, and put it into
Zope.  I'd like to do nice dynamic things like, say, have a Quick
Links bar that is defined somewhere.  This could then be turned on or
off by the user (probably by saving a cookie).  Also, maybe I'd like
to use this Quick Links bar in other documents.  First, I suspect that 
I should then make an object with the Quick Links bar.  How do I
import that object into documents later?  There was a reference in the 
DTML manual to an addDocument function, but I can't find any
information on that function.

Also, how do I go about doing the dynamic inclusion and cookie
settings?  Specifically, how do I make a "click here to remove" thing
that will set a cookie saying to not display that particular part?

How do I do virtual hosting with Zope?  For instance, let's say I have 
5 websites, each with different domain names, but hosted on the same
machine.  Right now, I've got Zope's special server going (not using
the Apache tie-in).  Do I need to use the Apache tie-in, and if so,
does this have a negative impact on performance?

There are some things that just cannot easily be put into Zope.  For
instance, I have software that creates a HTML tree for mailing list
archives, and updates the tree each night.  With Apache, I just set an 
Alias so that these items can be easily seen.  How can I do this with
Zope?  Is it even possible?

What sort of logs does the Zope server produce?  Can they be formatted 
to be like Apache's so standard web log analyzer software can parse
them?

Thanks!

-- John Goerzen