Bootstrapping with Tinderbox and Zope

I am bootstrapping: The start page of my weblog now renders through a homemade skinning system based on Zope and Page Templates. This means I do not design this pages with the template files Tinderbox uses for the HTML export. For example here is the template of the current start page:

There is still a lot of work to do, but the goal is to use the Tinderbox templates only to define an absolute minimum. I need to get used to this abstraction layer for a while before moving on with the next level: getting rid of the HTML export and FTP upload altogether and importing the Tinderbox file into a database directly.

The ^children(…)^ command will then be replaced with some kind of method that pulls results from a SQL query. I may even consider to have two different Tinderbox files for one weblog: one to author the actual content and the other to design the presentation logic and the hierarchy.

The idea behind this is a) to be much more flexible about the way content is presented, b) to hide the publishing process completely in the background (just save to update) and – most importantly – c) to organize notes and articles in Tinderbox fairly independently from the way it is presented. It can be imagined like working on a creative wiki-style stack of notes here while presenting a weblog and article collections with options for user interactions (subscriptions, comments, RSS) there.