[Tutor] [opinions?] Web development... (kind of long)

[Israel Evans]

Hello everyone...


I'm in a bit of a quandry.  I have a number of websites that I'm working on,
mostly personal non professional jobs, but a few of them need to be of that
caliber.  I am very interested in using Python to automate a lot of the
creation of individual pages and taking care of the tedious task of updating
a frequently updated site.  I've looked at a number of options, but none of
them have filled me with glee as of yet.  I'm calling out to this wonderful
list to see if any of you with web development experience have any
resounding opinions on the web publishing options available to us
pythonistas(or fledgling pythonistas as the case may be).

I've looked at Zope but it seems to be a very greedy paradigm.  Everything
must be fed to the great Zope management interface, registered, methodized
and otherwise recreated.  It feels as if I'm no longer following the
standards of the w3c and creating html, xhtml, xml and so on.

I was hoping Webware would be a more relaxed lightweight alternative, but I
was having trouble getting everything working.  This may have to wait until
I upgrade my pc later this year.

Python Server Pages sounds great, but it's a Java/Jython thing and I just
seem to have this prejudice against using java when I have Python.  I know
it's not the same thing. I know I'm actually writing in Python and the Java
part only comes in as the final form of the code in much the same way that C
Python  ends up being C somewhere down the line.

  My goals are as follows;  
I'd like to create a number of templates for the look and feel for all pages
in a site.  
I'd like to create a number of ways the site would be updated automatically
whenever new content is added to either a database or the directories of
which the site is made of.  
It would be great if I could do this on the client, but the Server Side is
nice as well.
I'd like the content to be dynamically loaded in as it is requested by the
user.  

I come from a land of strict XHTML couple with CSS and Javascript.  I'm only
now getting into the crazy world of Server Side web applications, persistent
data, and python programming.  I'd like to create documents that adhere to
the standards of XHTML, XML and so on and still have something like server
side includes to carry out the programming parts of things.  I'd also like
to at least have those documents remain inviolated by the code.  The Code
should be able to grab what files it needs, do the things it is supposed to
do and publish it as standards compliant documents.  It just creeps me out
to have things mingle too much.

Anyway.. Sorry about the rambling.  I know there are many folks out there
with much more experience than I and I hope to hear from these kind and
knowing souls to help me resolve my quandry.

Thanks a bunch,

~Israel~