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Creating Folders


Stan's first task is to create Folders for the three departments within the Plutonia Folder, along with presenting some sort of public view of those Folders. Zope joins these two tasks together when creating Folders.

The first Folder Stan creates, he decides to call News , the Folder in which the PR department will be responsible primarily for updating. To add the new Folder Stan follows these steps:

  1. Stan goes to the /manage URL in the Web browser. The Zope management screen appears as shown in Figure 1 . The Zope management screen is a two-frame interface. The frame on the left, known as the navigation frame, shows all the Folders and subfolders or any folder-like object. It allows easy movement between different areas of a Zope site. The frame on the right is known as the workspace . This is where work on individual objects is done. Screens inside the workspace are known as workspace views .
  2. Zope management screen and Plutonia Folder Contents view

     

The grey boxes at the top of the workspace are the object tabs . Object tabs are used to switch between different views of an object. The tab of the current view selected is a lighter color than the other object tabs. See Object Reference for an explanation of the different views for each object.

    The main view used in Zope is a Folder's Contents view (Figure 1 ). The list of items with checkboxes in front of them are the Folder items . These are the objects in the current Folder. The checkboxes are used to select objects for Folder actions . The buttons just below the Folder items are the Folder actions. These buttons operate on items whose checkboxes are selected. The drop-down list with the "Add" button under it is the Add List . This lets you add a new object to the current Folder.

  1. By selecting "Folder" from the Add List and clicking the "Add" button, an "Add Folder" form appears in Stan's workspace as shown in Figure 2 .
  2. Add Folder

     

  3. Stan provides the Folder information as follows:
  4. He sets "Id" to News . The id appears in the URL for the new folder.
  5. He sets "Title" to The Plutonia News

He makes sure the "Create public interface" and "Create user folder" options are selected. With these selected, a new DTML Document with the id, index_html, and a User Folder are created in the new Folder. The index_html document is displayed when the Folder object is called via a URL. This is what is also known as the Folder's Public Interface . Those familiar with traditional Web publishing will recognize this as the same behavior as an index.html or default.htm document.

  1. Stan then clicks "Add" to create the Folder. The new Folder is added to the Folder Items list and appears in Stan's navigation frame.
  2. Stan follows the same steps to create the products folder with the id Products and the title The Plutonia Product Line and the research folder with the id Research and the title The Plutonia's Research Unit.

The first part of his task is completed! His /manage screen should now look like Figure 3 .

Manage screen after adding department Folders

 

    Notice the "+" marks next to the new folders in the navigation frame. These marks indicate that the corresponding folders are expandable. Remember that Stan chose the option to create User Folders when adding the new Folders. Since User Folders are a special type of folder-like object, they too will appear in the navigation frame when the department Folders are expanded.

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