BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2000 > January
A Zope Primer
By Jon Udell
January 21, 2000
(A Zope Primer
: Page 1 of 3 )
This week, the subject of Zope came up again. I'd been pounding my head against the wall trying to figure some things out, and finally posted an exasperated plea to my newsgroup, in which I detailed some problems getting Zope's ZCatalog search engine to search Zope's own source code.
Why? Well, I've begun to be productive in Zope, and would like to be more productive. The overwhelming bottleneck is availability of information. It struck me that Zope could use something like Mozilla's searchable, cross-referenced source viewer. Is there such a tool that groks Python syntax rather than C, I wondered?
Apparently not, and despite some helpful suggestions from folks on the Zope mailing list, I haven't solved that ZCatalog problem yet either. But despite the immaturity of Zope and its documentation, I've got to admit I've been bitten by the bug. I'm doing some really useful stuff with the product, and this week I decided it was time to give something back. If the major bottleneck is documentation, why not contribute some of my own? So here's a quick tutorial on Zope's Calendar Tag, which I hope will convey the flavor of Zope programming.
What is the Calendar Tag?
The Calendar Tag is a piece of software, written in Python, that extends the DTML (Document Template Markup Language) which is Zope's equivalent to CFML (the Cold Fusion Markup Language), or ASP, or Java Server Pages. Probably the most powerful of Zope's built-in DTML tags is "<dtml-tree>," which renders an HTML tree control. In addition to Zope's own management interface, a surprising number of useful applications can be built on top of the tree control, partly because such a thing is just generally useful, and partly because Zope's built around an object database (ZODB) that works well with tree-structured data.
Since Calendar Tag isn't built in to Zope, you have to first install it.
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