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

[Ungerleider, Jack]

Wouldn't wrapping RSS feeds do the same type of thing. Basically a user
performs a search or creates a Smart Folder that contains the content
that's needed. Either of these can be used to generate an RSS feed which
provides Title, description, dates, author, etc. It then becomes a
matter of XSLT to turn the RSS feed into an HTML newsletter. Various
"standard form" templates can be provided to kick start usage of the
product. There are plenty of decent books and tools for working with
XSLT available to help users through the process.


Jack Ungerleider
IT Professional
Community Involvement Programs
E-mail: jacku at cipmn.org
My comments are my own and do not reflect the opinions of my employer

-----Original Message-----
From: ngo-bounces at lists.plone.org [mailto:ngo-bounces at lists.plone.org]
On Behalf Of George Lee
Sent: Sunday, January 07, 2007 11:20 PM
To: ngo at lists.plone.org
Subject: [Plone-NGOs] Newsletter Musings - TALES like control for
Non-ZMIusers

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


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