[Zope] How do people work with html-designers?

[Chris Withers]

Gaute Amundsen wrote:
> How do people set up the zope development process and servers to work well 
> with web-designers who use wysiwyg editors like dreamweaver?

I use Twiddler for templating in these kind of situations:

http://www.simplistix.co.uk/software/python/twiddler

...as it provides a complete seperation of what the designers work with 
and what the programmers work with. Provided what the designers save is 
XHTML and they preserve the ids that the programmer is expecting, 
there's no problem at all :-)

> After all one of the advertised advantages of ZPT, is that you can send the 
> template back to the designer without him destroying the TAL code. (not right 
> away at least)

That, for ZPT, was sadly a myth.

> In practice I find that once the original html has been split into "main 
> tempate" and "content template" parts, or the like, it gets rather 
> impractical to involve the designer again, and we end up having the coders do 
> way more css work than they should.

Ultimately, that depends on how you do the split. It's certainly 
possible to have the template and content template be realy html 
documents that designers can work with...

> I know you can leave the "dummy content" in place, but often the stylesheets, 
> and scripts live in a different folder, and gets aquired by zope for 
> publishing.

Again, if you're careful, you can let your designers work on these files 
consistently...

> If I could get this whole process to be more of a two way thing, I could do do 
> stuff, like start a site with a prototype, and have the designer beautyfy 
> that, and work iteratively, instead of allways starting with the graphic 
> design...

Yup, this is how I enjoy working ;-)

cheers,

Chris

-- 
Simplistix - Content Management, Zope & Python Consulting
            - http://www.simplistix.co.uk