Zope Page Templates

What we have seen so far is very nice for dynamic content generation. But one of the best things about DTML (or any other sophisticated server-side macro language) is the ability to define menus in one document, headers in a second and footers in a third, and then for each page to import them as necessary.

One way to handle this situation is to create three separate templates (menu, header and footer) in the current folder, importing them with TAL expressions such as:

<span tal:replace="container/menu">
 menu goes here</span>

TALES looks at the current template's container, retrieves the menu object (which happens to be a page template itself) and inserts its contents into the current document in place of the <span> tag.

Another way to approach DTML's flexibility is with the use of macros. Macros are common in many programming languages and allow us to create functionality that expands at runtime. The ZPT macro language is called METAL, and like TAL and TALES, it is defined and invoked within HTML attributes, placed in the “metal:” XML namespace. METAL macros can define “slots”, or parameters, into which parameter values can be bound. It's easy to imagine how you could create a macro that handles the overall site design, with each document fitting into the slot that this macro provides. Changing the macro definition would effectively change the design of the entire site.

When I first heard about ZPT, I was sure that it was yet another new way to create templates that are incompatible with other techniques and technologies. But over time, I have become convinced that ZPT is indeed a clever and elegant idea, and one that offers advantages to developers and designers alike. Although it is not a complete replacement for DTML, I believe that most of my DTML usage can now be replaced by a combination of TAL, TALES and METAL. I look forward to seeing how these technologies improve over time and how they are integrated more fully into Zope in the coming months and years.

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