[Zope-CMF] Re: what lies in store for us if we choose Zope/CMF?

[Alexander Limi]

On 10 Jan 2004 16:10:31 -0500, Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com> wrote:

>> The downside of Zope seems to be its learning curve:
>> although it's allegedly easy to start off with Zope,
>> several things I've read have indicated that the curve
>> slopes gently at first and gets much steeper later on.
>
> This is true.
>
>> It's a little challenging to figure out exactly what
>> that means.
>
> It means that it's simple to get started doing simple things (and even
> some not-so-simple things), but lots of people experience a point where
> what they've created using Zope needs to be deconstructed and rewritten
> in a different way to make it "maintainable".

This happens in most other systems as well, and is not a Zope-specific  
trait. It's pretty easy to spot in a Zope application after a while,  
however. :)

In general, there's a lot of concepts that will seem "new" to you at  
first. Stuff like workflow, separating content/presentation/logic and  
other concepts take some trial and error getting used to. Also working  
inside a persistent object-oriented database is confusing to some, depends  
on what you've been doing earlier.

However, the #1 problem I've seen so far (with customers and such) is that  
people are likely to try to do a bottom-up learning of the system. Ie:  
They try to first learn Zope, then learn CMF, and then Plone.

Usually the opposite approach works much better: Start with the high-level  
applications (like Plone), and figure out what they do, how they work, and  
what things they enable you to do.

You can dig into the details later - Zope is a complex beast (like in  
"advanced", not "unnecessarily complex" - although that's a truth with  
some modifications too ;), and if you start your quest for knowledge  
inside the ZPublisher code, I'll guarantee you that you need a place at  
the asylum very soon. ;)

Like when you started using your computer - don't worry about learning it  
all at once - soak up the bits that are relevant to you, and the rest will  
come later.

Zope's difficult learning curve is overrated, the documentation for Zope  
is much better now than it was back in the day when that analysis was  
relevant.

(insert back-in-the-days/when-I-was-your-age comments here ;)

-- 
__________________________________________________________________

  Alexander Limi   ·   Interaction Architect   ·   Plone Solutions

  Development · Training · Support · http://www.plonesolutions.com
__________________________________________________________________

  Plone Co-Founder   ·   http://plone.org   ·   Connecting Content

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