More Page Templates (a buttal of sorts?). Jon Udell and Zope Newbies both write stuff along the lines of I decided again not to use them because they would add more complexity to my sites and wouldn't solve any problems -- I'm not about to start using Dreamweaver or GoLive any time soon. It's just me and Pepper or Mozilla. I don't have to work with any designers, or that the learning curve is too steep.
Personally, I think that the learning curve for Page Templates is much smaller than DTML. The only problem is in trying to think like DTML when you really shouldn't be. While there are helpful conversion guides, I do think it best to approach ZPT on a fresh project rather than trying to retrofit them into something existing (by either adding on to a site/project, or trying to replace existing DTML).
I've been using DTML since early 1997, and it was a joy when I first used it - there was no Zope, there was no through-the-web editing, there were no DTML expressions, there was just a clean templating language meant to be combined with Bobo published objects. All real logic happened in Python, and display oriented logic could happen in DTML. It worked out well. But, as DTML has grown new appendages in an ad-hoc manner over the years since then, it's become more and more of a wild card. Page Templates in Zope, combined with Python Scripts give us back a lot of that early power. I think there's less harm in trying them than avoiding them. They're truly one of the few really clean extensions to Zope - well designed, well maintained. Members of PythonLabs really got involved and did an excellent job ensuring Pythonic standards were met, and early contributors like Todd Coram (who introduced me to Ruby) did an equally good job of driving the design of TAL/TALES to be a fairly open design specification, of which Page Templates are merely an implementation. [Industrie Toulouse]
