[Plone-NGOs] Newsletter Musings - TALES like control for Non-ZMI users

[George Lee]

Is there anyway to let a non-power user of Plone define a newsletter layout
that takes, say, 15 upcoming events and lets them define how to display them,
e.g. like

<h2 tal:content="item/Title" />
<p tal:content="item/Description" />

but without forcing them to know TALES or go into the ZMI?

One of the newsletter products did something like use %s to indicate where
different things went, but I didn't know how extensible this was and also how
protective this was against user mistakes.

I suppose ideally one would be able to do something like associate each content
type, on a per-type basis, with a set of expressions like Title, Description,
MyCustomField1. There might be a toolbar with the different fields as buttons;
one could click the Title button and an image [[Title]] would appear, letting
you compose something like:

<h2>[[Title]]</h2>
<p>[[Description]]</p>

Then going farther, you would want there to be a way to loop through all your
items

<tal:block repeat="item items" />

so you'd want a way to specify

These are the upcoming events:
[[Begin loop of items]]
<h2>[[Title]]</h2>
<p>[[Description]]</p>
[[End loop items]]

I wonder if that would be good -- taking two key parts of TALES and putting them
into a more user-friendly UI that could be modified without going into the ZMI.

Thinking out loud; peace,
George