Plone uses a page templating mechanism known as Zope Page Templates ( ZPT). ZPT, in turn, uses a language known as the Template Attribute Language(TAL). ZPT also uses a language called Macro Extensions, known as METAL, which is outside of the scope of this chapter.
In this chapter, we'll cover the theory of TAL's basic constructs and see how a real Plone site might output dynamic content using these expressions. For the definitive information on Zope Page Templating, please refer to The Zope Book:
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/ZPT.stx.
The objective of using a templating language is to output dynamic content while minimizing the amount of code in page templates. Ideally, templating languages should play nicely with tools that designers might use to theme around a web site. In other words, a tool like Dreamweaver should ignore code, even if it cannot output the dynamic results. An extra...