The message below describes my experience with Forrest 0.7.
Over the past few months I've been working to convert a site--built by someone else with Dreamweaver--to Forrest. Lately I find myself revisiting the question of what the goal really is. I initially chose Forrest over Cocoon because I misunderstood that Cocoon is used only as a servlet (similar to Forrest's dynamic mode as in 'forrest run') and this is not easily accomplished in our current hosting environment. I now see that Cocoon offers several methods to achieve offline or static generation of content. My question then is what do I gain by using Forrest?
This question surely depends on the use case, so I will try to describe that now. My goal is to separate content from presentation. The current material is a nightmare to maintain when you have to dig through presentational markup to find the content you need to edit. This is the same reason that a new global layout or look to the site is no trivial task. I chose Forrest thinking that I could use the content of the old site and format it as XML of some sort, and then use stylesheets to render the site as it appears now--the difference being that it would be much easier to maintain. So far, with a custom skin, this is working. I can reproduce the site in Forrest with my custom skin and life goes on. But I have to wonder if I'm on the right track.
To summarize my use case, I maintain a site that is a real mess. Layout is accomplished with tables and other presentational markup that was already deprecated when the site was designed. Do I gain anything by using Forrest rather than Cocoon directly?
Thank you, Brian
