[Zope] DTMLTemplate product 0.2.0 released

Michael Halle halazar@media.mit.edu
Tue, 14 Mar 2000 00:38:56 -0500


I've just released my first development version of DTMLTemplates.

You can find the distribution at:

http://www.zope.org/Members/halazar/Products/DTMLTemplate

DTML Templates are documents that allow blocks of text to be named and
made available to other documents. The basic building block of
templates is the DTML "block" tag, which can also be used with other
DTML document types. Templates export their blocks. Another new tag,
the "suppress" tag, allows block definition without rendering.

Here are several nice features of blocks and templates that I believe
will greatly benefit the Zope community (several of these items have
come up recently in Zope email discussions):

	* defines libraries of methods in one file,

	* allows structured text formatting in a DTML document,

	* allows pieces of multiple documents to be combined,

	* allows complex web designs created with HTML editors 
          to be used as templates,

	* provides template elements that encourage proper
	  nesting of markup tags.

In short, I think that Templates offer great promise for the Zope
and Zope developers.

This release is a very early one, though.  A construct as fundamental
as this one may need both syntactic and structural tweaks to function
in the most useful way, and only with discussion can we figure that
way out.  Please don't count on this product being stable for at least
a couple of releases.  

I appreciate your interest and feedback.

						Michael Halle
						mhalle@media.mit.edu