Template-trouble

Hi Yuri,

 some short reply:

 > 
 > As said, the left column is used for navigation/indexing. Example: at 
 > the 'people'-section, the left-column should contain a full listing of 
 > all employee-templates in the 'people'  folder. (Each employee has its 
 > own template with some info.)
 > I tried using a separate template called 'left', which contained a 
 > manually maintained listing. Not an option. ;)
 > 
 > Is there a way to retrieve a listing of templates in a folder, filter 
 > and display them?

 Have You looked as the API.txt? The current version should be available here:

http://cvs.infrae.com/SilvaDocumentation/API.txt?rev=1.12&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup


 If You want, You _can_ include another page template (or DTML if that
fits You better) via some line like:

  <tal:block content="structure here/left" />

Anyway hand maintaned lists are a bad option if the software gives You
things like the "get_ordered_publishables", which is most probably what
You want to look for.

 > #2)
 > 
 > For the menu, I used dhtmlcentral's CoolMenus. It's a Javascript-based 
 > script which uses it's own stylesheet.
 > Our adapted version looks like this:
 > 
 > [ item][ item ][ item ][ item ] [ ... ]
 > 
 > Implementing the menu was quite easy, but it has to be dynamic. So if 
 > i.e. section News has no items, item 'News' shouldn't be visible.
 > Is it possible to check for a section whether it's filled or not?

 Hm, I have never heard about this CoolMenus stuff ... however 
if You want to filter for non-empty folders, You maybe could use the
"is_published" method. For folders this is true iff it contains
published objects, which is most proabaly what You want ... if would not
make a lot of sense to show a link to the 'News' section if its not
empty but none of the content objects inside are published.

Hope this helps a little,
Clemens