[z3-five] Re: post-processing template result

[Paul Everitt]

Martin Aspeli wrote:
> On Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:57:54 -0000, Paul Everitt 
> <paul at zope-europe.org> wrote:
> 
>>
>> FWIW, I played around with such pipelines once with Tres at last 
>> year's sprint before EuroPython.  We hooked the Xicken test CMS up to 
>> Zope 3's publishing events, passing all results through a pipeline.
>>
>> The bad news is that this event isn't available via Five and won't be 
>> any time soon.
>>
>> That isn't really what you're looking for, though, as you want it to 
>> be per-templated, not for all results on the site.
>>
>> As a different FWIW, I finally got off my butt and wrote up an 
>> implementation of the Zope Site Themes proposal:
>>
>>    http://codespeak.net/svn/z3/deliverance/trunk/meldX/
>>
>> The README.html hopefully explains the idea.  With a rulefile like this:
>>
>>    http://codespeak.net/svn/z3/deliverance/trunk/meldX/rulefile.xml
> 
> This is really cool. :-)

Hey, thanks!  I think it is an idea that would make our target market 
thrilled in a number of ways.

> Is this intended/possible to use in the context of Plone, i.e. to 
> meld/post-assemble the template that comes out of main_template (or a 
> custom page template)?

I didn't really want to put any barriers on where it happened.  In fact, 
I'm doing this theming in the browser on 2 side projects. :^)

Mostly, it's a question of what group of folks is interested in it.  I 
did it first for Z3 ECM, then a Zope fishbowl proposal, then mentioned 
it on the CMF list.  There wasn't much interest so I stopped promoting 
it in those places.

If there's interest here, fine, if not, I'll just use it on side 
projects and see what happens later.  (Note that Enfold used it for a 
Zope 3 project and was happy with the performance.)

>> ...you can change all your pages to look like plone.org.  The other 
>> stuff in that deliverance directory showed this being hooked up in 
>> mod_python, to let Apache do dynamic theming.
> 
> Does meldX work in Zope, or in Apache?

It could easily work in Zope 3 (Xicken shows this).  It could easily 
work in Apache.  It could somewhat-easily work in the browser.  For Zope 
2, it would require a monkey patch to FSPageTemplate or something.

This implementation presumes lxml.  That might turn some people off.  A 
different implementation of the engine, but producing the same result 
useful for the same artifacts, could be done with ElementTree or even SAX.

For me, though, lxml gave a ridiculously-tiny amount of code needed to 
gain what I think is a compelling win for a CMS.

--Paul