The web application server Zope has a very long history which dates back to the late ’90s.

Quoting Martijn Faassen:

Zope must be one of the oldest Python codebases in the world that is still used outside the standard library.

During its many years of existence the way a view gets rendered has changed.

Basically there are two supported template mechanisms:

  • Document Template Markup Language (DTML)
  • Zope Page Templates (ZPT)

DTML is pretty much outdated for more than a decade, but still in use for the Zope Management Interface.

ZPTs are basically XML/HTML pages in which special markup is embedded (TAL), which gets processed server side.

The processing is done by a template engine - this used to be the PageTemplateEngine.

With the release of Zope 4 this engine has been superseded by the Chameleon template engine, which is now activated per default.

While Chameleon offers more flexibility and better performance, there may be reasons(TM) for using the old template engine.

word of caution

As of using Zope 4.1, the old PageTemplateEngine currently works, but it is deprecated and subject to be removed anytime.

activate PageTemplateEngine

True to the Python motto “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it." there is no obvious, but three rather obscure ways to get back the old engine - at least for the ZCML apprentice. ZCML stands for Zope Configuration Mark-up Language.

ZCML was introduced with Zope 3, and is used to wire together different parts of your application.

one

Go to src/Products/PageTemplates/configure.zcml and comment out the configuration.

This can only be a temporary solution, as you should not modify an upstream package, e.g. Zope.

two

Make use of z3c.unconfigure and unconfigure the registration.

three

Create an overrides.zcml with the following content:

<configure xmlns="http://namespaces.zope.org/zope"
           xmlns:zcml="http://namespaces.zope.org/zcml">

  <!-- This registration disables Chameleon templates on Zope 4. -->
  <utility
    zcml:condition="installed chameleon"
    component="zope.pagetemplate.pagetemplate.PageTemplateEngine" />

</configure>