[ZODB-Dev] Re: Ruby/Smalltalk OODB

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net> wrote:
> Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> Christian Theune wrote:
>>>
>>> this might be interesting to ZODB users and developers:
>>> http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/302177093/article.pl
>>
>> What I find interesting is that Python has had such a thing for about a
>> decade (the ZODB), and a mostly vaporware announcement in the Ruby world
>> makes such a splash.
>
> That's because most things Zope are not very good with PR.

I know what the reason is. I just want to point it out again. Not
being good at it is not an excuse not to get better. It can be done,
it's just that it's not been a priority in people's minds.

>> The future is already here folks. So, what's the status of the
>> zodb.zope.org project to actually promote it better? It's easy to know what
>> to write on the homepage, just go to the Ruby buzz, translate the hype inI
>> terms of the ZODB, tone it down some, and add that it's been battle-tested
>> for a decade.
>
> I assume you mean http://new.zope.org/projects/zodb ? It's there, waiting
> for the rest of that site to be finished.

Progress! Good.

Some criticisms next:

The site is nothing compared to what it could be concerning
documentation. It's currently consists of mostly a huge amount of
empty pages of documentation that will intimidate anyone who wants to
work on this site. I strongly recommend doing it the other way around:
mine the existing documentation and assemble this into a site, and
don't intimidate people with a lot of empty structure. It also holds
back the whole new.zope.org project itself, as lots of empty pages
will make people wait to publish the site until it's all filled,
meaning it will never actually happen.

Is anyone actually approaching ZODB developers to fill in pieces? The
only way any ZODB site is going to improve if people on this very
mailing list will actually do something about it. It won't be me.

Finally, I still think this project is big enough to warrant its own
site, independent from the rest of zope.org. If you did this, you
wouldn't need the red letters that this can be used independently from
Zope, it'd be implicit, and people would really trust that this is
indeed the case instead of the nagging suspicion I think they'll end
up with now.

What I would do (but I'm not in charge of this and don't want to be)
is to put up a zodb.zope.org with what's there now, give everybody who
wants to add documentation access to add content, and then nag until
it contains some. Probably the current set of two real pages would be
enough to embaress people into adding more.

Regards,

Martijn

P.S. Wichert, I know you're doing good work. I'm just hoping someone
on this mailing list is actually listening and wants to coordinate
this effort (and then actually does it).