Re: wgo Iteration I

[Kevin Teague <kevin bud ca>]

On Nov 6, 2006, at 3:22 AM, Quim Gil wrote:

> > it's possible to create a main_template and some basic templates
>
> Do you mean we can have several templates prepared for secondary pages
> and editors could choose a template when creating a page? For  
> instance,
> having 5 templates for case studies so they don't look all the same.
>
> This would make wgo nicer. Editors could still be able to pick a  
> "Empty
> body template" and compose the body inside inserting images etc, but
> lazy editors could just pick a template according to the materials
> available (i.e. short text and 2 pictures) and go for it.
>
> Or am I misunderstanding the "template" thing?

main_template in Plone is the name of a file of the template that  
controls the structure of every page in a web site.

Templating in Plone usually refers to writing Zope Page Templates  
(ZPT). These creatures pull in data from various content objects and  
allow for a limited amount of presentation logic to be embedded  
within them.

For your case study example that sounds more like content templating.  
There is a product that supports this (I've not used it) called,  
well, Plone Templates:

http://plone.org/products/plonetemplates/

Finally, it should be mentioned that there is a 'display' menu in  
Plone allows you to select which ZPT template is used to display a  
particular content object. Stock Plone includes a few displays that  
can be used for the Folder content type, e.g. standard view, tabular  
view and thumbnail view. The other content types only have a single  
view method out-of-the-box (which means that do not have a display  
menu), but it's quite easy to add new templates, in which case the  
display menu shows up for those objects.

It is a common pattern to do one-offs of these display menu  
templates. For example, I wrote a template that had Job application  
information hard-coded in it, and then said, 'display a table of all  
jobs within this Folder'. Of course, there is only one folder in the  
web site in which this display makes any sense:

http://www.bcgsc.ca/career/

Using the display menu would also make sense if you developed an add- 
on product for Plone that provided a Case Study content type. If you  
built this content type along the lines of RichDocument (http:// 
plone.org/products/richdocument) it could then have a number of  
images attached to it. You could then have templates such as, 'first  
image large on the right, all other images thumbnail on the bottom' ,  
'all images as thumbnail' etc.

- Kevin