How “important” are forms for our website?
Form frameworks? What do they solve?
History of forms in Plone:
- CMFFormController: not really a form framework. or at least
does’t do more then half of the stuff you would expect from form framework today. depends on having “controller script” which relays to different (Zope) “Python Scripts”. You could create form TTW. Amazigly but it still used in some places in Plone 4.
zope.formlib: Library which ships with Zope. Also used a lot in Plone’s controlpanel (eg. portlets are depending massivly on it). It is based on the idea that you create schema (interface) which lists fields, constrains, invariants, ... Then special view are used to render form properly, widgets, etc.
However, it can be cumbersome to use, especially when it comes to creating custom widgets or more dynamic forms.
(Martin Aspeli, http://plone/org, Shema-driven forms tutorial)
z3c.form: not so new anymore (initial release: 2007-05-24). Inspired by zope.formlib, but allowing more flexibility. The thing we are going to talk about today.