Layout Design and structures that are intuitive with the nature of Silva and Silva News

Well I tried installing Five 1.2.6 and the zope instance isn't in love with it

    from Products.Five import interfaces, i18n
  File "C:\Zope\SoleilJune02-08\Products\Five\i18n.py", line 22, in ?
    from zope.i18nmessageid import MessageID
ImportError: cannot import name MessageID

SilvaLayout is the way to go, it allows you to do things in a modular way, and outside the ZODB, so that you can easily backup and version the layout part of your application/site. Which version of Silva are you using, and what does it's PRODUCTS.txt say is the right version of Five?

I'm using Silva 2.0.6
The Silva Product text says that it needs Silva Layout 1.0.1
and the SilvaLayout I'm using says 1.3... which requires Five 1.2 according to it's install.txt

I haven't found much documentation for SilvaLayout that explains clearly how to use it though...?

so, why not start with installing the correct version? ;)

Oh and re: documentation, look in the README.txt in SilvaLayout. There's quite a bit there.

what purpose is the Silva Layout 1.3, if it is not compatable with Silva 2.0.6?

SilvaLayout 1.3 should work with Silva 2.0.6. I'm not sure you have the right version of Zope, though. In Zope 2.10.x you should not have to install your own Five since that is included with zope and that version should work with SilvaLayout. Having said that, are you sure you want to switch? If you have a working layout in Silva, it will keep working without SilvaLayout. Porting it will involve programming, and unless you're up for that *and* want to make use of new features in SilvaLayout, it may be overkill.

alright in that case let me write here exactly what we are looking for and then if you can, you can provide me with the direction I need.
Basically we are using the SilvaNewsNetwork to do all of our publications
And the main thing is that we would like to have some better design options. Using the News Viewer (Not tested after the upgrade) sometimes previewing an article shows an image that goes along with the article, on sometimes not...

Using the sites from Silva's reference page, we would like to be able to display our articles so they look a little like each of the following:
http://www.oxfam.org/en/
http://da.mod.uk/
http://www.waldwissen.net/

I understand that most of the textural aspects of displaying the articles deals with CSS... I'm just not sure how to insure that the images always show up...

So I guess that question can be narrowed down to, is it all just css manipulation or is there some programming involved behind those designs?

As far as I know, none of those sites use Silva. I think the layouts could be recreated both with SilvaLayout or without, using macros and page templates.

Really? I got those sites from this page: http://www.infrae.com/about/references... I guess I must have misinterpreted that page... Oops...

The other reason why I was looking into Silva layout was to change the layout a little bit depending on the section of the site they were on... If I did the same thing using the layout_macro html file I foresee myself using

<tal:if condition="python:here.get_short_title() == 'snous'">
and
<tal:if condition="python:here.get_container() == 'events'">

I currently do this to change up parts of the styling on a page. But by doing this technique I fear of having a layout_macro file that is several pages long, and I don't know if that will slow zope down to parse through all 20 different Tal:ifs each time there is a section that requires it.

I can get by with minimal programming like the above... But from my first impressions of Silva Layout It seems to require a much more extensive knowledge of the zope structure.

> Really? I got those sites from this page: http://www.infrae.com/about/references... I guess I must have misinterpreted that page... Oops...

Indeed, you must have: these are all Infrae customers, not all of them use Silva.

Re: changing layout locally:

The nice thing about zope is that you don't have to test for these conditions: just override what you want in the place where you want to override it. Again possible with or without Silva Layout. You can put a custom content.html (or anything else) in a subfolder, and it will be used there and below it instead of the root level object of the same name.

The only problem I have with that has to do with the way we originally designed our structure in the back end
which goes
Publication 1
    Real estate
    Health
    Horoscopes
Publication 2
    Real estate
    Health
    Horoscopes

So that would mean putting the override in all the real estate folders all the health folders and all the horoscope folders

I can't imagine having to update all of them at the same time.... Unless... Would it be possible to ghost this file?

Thanks thisfred, that solved my question.