Printable Page (beta) on Dogbowl

By taking advantage of the new Skins feature of the CMF, making "Printable Pages" is now much easier than it normally would be in Zope proper. Making a Printable Page typically involves getting rid of sidebar and other extras that are good on screen but not good on a printed document - something very useful when building knowledge management sites which feature articles one might want hard copies of. To implement this feature on your own CMF site, do the following steps: 1. In the 'portal_skins' tool, create a new folder to hold your customized skin with an id like 'Printable'. 2. Go to the 'portal_skins/generic' folder and click on 'standard_html_header'. Since this is a file-system DTML file, you can't customize it here. Instead, there's a form to let you copy the source to a skin folder (a folder that's in the Skins tool). Select 'Printable' and click 'Customize'. 3. You'll be brought to the management screen for 'portal_skins/Printable/standard_html_header'. From here, you can customize it how you want. The simplest thing to do is to remove the links to style sheet information, and get rid of the layout table (especially the *actions_box* reference). 4. Go back to 'portal_skins/generic' and repeat step 2 for 'standard_html_footer'. There are some closing table tags for the normal layout table, those need to be removed. 5. Optionally, you can also go to 'portal_skins/no_css' and do a 'Customize' on the 'stylesheet_properties' item. 6. Now we can finally make a Skin! Go to the 'portal_skins' tool itself and click on the 'Properties' tab. There should be a table of existing skins, with a blank row at the bottom. If the right-hand values in the table have slashes in them (ie, 'control/Generic/custom'), enter the following into the blank row: o Name: **Printable** o Layers: **control/Generic/Printable** If you see commas in the right-hand column, (ie, 'custom, Generic, control'), enter the following into the blank row: o Name: **Printable** o Layers: **Printable, Generic, control** Then click the 'Add' button. You've just created a skin. 7. To use it, you need to put a link somewhere to get to the printable page. On the 'portal_skins' tool properties is "Request variable". It's default value is 'portal_skin'. This is what is looked up in the REQUEST to find the skin (and if it's not found, a cookie, member data, and then the default skin settings are used to determine which skin to use). The link (try skinning 'standard_top_bar' into the 'custom' skin) can be as simple as something like:: print This is basically how this feature was added to the dogbowl. It may seem like a lot of steps, but it is actually quite an improvement over the way it is done on Zope.org and classic.zope.org.