A Custom Job - Zope

Want to add a little interactivity to your Zope portal? Take a look at ZUBB, the modestly-named Zope Ultimate Bulletin Board.

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By: icarus, (c) Melonfire

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April 24, 2002

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SEARCH DEV SHED

TOOLS YOU CAN USE

It's quite possible that you won't like the plain-vanilla interface that ships with ZUBB by default. Not to worry - as with all things in Zope, customizing the appearance of the board to your own particular requirements is fairly simple.

ZUBB comes with a default stylesheet named "local_css" - you'll see it in the folder containing the discussion forum. You can use this default stylesheet very simply, by creating a DTML method named "standard_html_header" and adding the following lines to it:

<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="local_css" type="text/css"> 
</head> <body>

Now, the next time you browse to the ZUBB forum, you should see something like this:

You can now easily alter the appearance of the pages by modifying the style rules in the CSS file.

If you take a look inside the folder containing the discussion board in the Zope management interface, you'll see a large number of DTML methods. Each of these methods contains, in addition to Zope program code, regular HTML formatting instructions that can also be used to alter the layout of the Web pages that make up ZUBB.

Here's a list of the important methods in the folder

index_html - the home page for the discussion forum

instructions - the instructional text that appears when posting messages

local_css - the stylesheet rules for the forum

postForm - the form used to post new messages, or start new discussions threads

post - the form processor for postForm

new_posts - the list of new posts

replyForm - the form used to reply to existing messages, or add to current threads

reply - the form processor for replyForm

searchForm - the search engine form

search - the search engine form processor

zubb_top_nav - the menu that appears at the top of every ZUBB page

Using the Zope management interface, it's fairly simple to customize the appearance of each of these elements...and, if you're familiar with DTML, even alter how they work.

Here's another example of a ZUBB forum customized in this manner: