[Zope3-dev] Why I posted about Zope3.org (the outsider's thoughts that got me thinking)

Tue Oct 11 13:48:06 EDT 2005

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Jeff Shell wrote:
> I wanted to post something here last night about these conversations
> I've been having in email with Ben Bangert, whose has the weblog
> http://www.groovie.org/ and has written tools like Routes
> http://routes.groovie.org/ - a tool for people who don't have the
> benefit of nice zope.publisher style URLs to make (and regenerate)
> nice URLs :)
> 
> These are some comments he made specifically about finding Zope 3
> information. They may seem a bit crude, but he seems genuinely
> frustrated. Now - I'll add that I'm impressed with tools like apidoc,
> the books, and all of that, but if you compare the Zope 3 wiki front
> page with that of http://www.rubyonrails.com/ and
> http://www.turbogears.org/ you'll see that there's a big difference.
> And you know that I personally have a big distaste for Wikis. Someone
> (I can't remember who) said recently that a good problem with Wikis is
> that it's hard to grok the relevance of a certain page - does it still
> apply to current thinking? There are a lot of historical artifacts in
> the Zope 3 development wiki. And I'm not saying that we should get rid
> of them, but it's just hard to know that PageA is a hypothetical
> dreamland item from three years ago and PageB right next to it is
> valid information and documentation for Zope 3.1. Anyways, I'll stop
> grand-standing on that and share Ben's thoughts. Well, after also
> saying that I know that we're all busy developers with real jobs,
> consultant gigs, research work, education, sprints, and so on, so I'm
> not volunteering myself nor expecting anyone else to take up the lead.
> But it would be great if someone did ;), and Bottlerocket may be able
> to help... when our current rush of jobs settles... (sigh).
> 
> Alright. Ben's statements:
> 
> """
> The documentation on the Zope site....ugh. That alone has driven me
> nuts more than I can remember. The docs are horrible, frequently
> outdated, only occasionally actually work, scattered around the site
> with little organization. The site navigation is absolutely horrible,
> things rarely indicate where you are, how you got there, whats next,
> etc. While I can see the little nav thing at the top, I'm referring
> more to the left sidebar that never indicates you are in that section.
> """
> - A good example of why Zope3.org should be its own site.
> 
> """
> Zope 3 hardly looks ready for anyone to use if you actually go to the
> website. It's slotted in under the Zope Corp page, and has the
> appearance of a science school project. It really deserves its own
> site devoted to it without all the extra navigation and confusing
> headers leading all over. Zope 3.1 needs a colorful, enticing,
> approaching site with excellent documentation that actually works and
> is maintained.
> """
> - We have doctests that actually work and are maintained, lets get
> some of that online! Lets get other doctest style documents online!
> 
> - Zope 3.1 is really really really a great release guys. I'm very
> impressed with the simplification of the component architecture, with
> the deprecation system, and with the generations system. It shows that
> Zope 3.1 is a serious release. I think it's a great candidate for
> getting up on the rooftops and shouting about.
> 
> """
> I'd really like to give Zope 3 a try, and I keep trying to. The docs
> are just nauseating. They might look good or fine to someone who's
> used Zope for years, but to someone new they're horrid. As I
> mentioned, the site is laid out horribly for someone who wants to
> learn Zope 3. Why is the left bar saturated with links when I just
> want Zope 3?
> 
> It's incredibly frustrating and disappointing to hear about all the
> cool stuff you can do in Zope 3, and not see anywhere that shows it
> actually being done with descriptions on how it works, etc. Where are
> the examples? Where are the recipies to "do cool thing X"?
> 
> The developers I see talk about Zope are all in companies that use
> it, that have teams that use it, that have tons of actual knowledge
> that doesn't exist on the website. I really really want to give Zope
> 3 a spin, I have a few fairly complex projects I'd like to try out
> with it. How do I get started?
> """
> 
> Ben is an intelligent Python programmer who is a big fan of Myghty,
> but might be just the kind of target audience we want for Zope 3 right
> now - educated, enthusiastic, interested developers with a history of
> web development. We all fit that bill here, but I imagine many of us
> have been using Zope for years, some of us going all the way back to
> Bobo and Principia. And I know that for me - Zope 3 is goddamn
> exciting. But how does that message carry over?
> 
> Personally, I really like the Z3ECM project site - z3lab.org. It has a
> combination of blogs, papers, demos (animations) and documentation.
> That's still a project in its infancy, but it's a good looking site
> with a variety of sources feeding into it. If there were to be a model
> for a Zope 3 web site, that would be it. The development wiki should
> still be inside of it, of course. But weblog entries like mine, like
> Martijn's, like Benji's, should all go into it as well (not as a
> "planet zope" type stream, but more dedicated so it's known that
> relevant information shows up).
> 
> I think that Zope 3 has its own momentum away from Zope 2. Five is
> what is going to be appealing to Zope 2 developers learning about Zope
> 3. There should be something that appeals to the general Python crowd
> that I still believe to be the main target for Zope 3 as it stands
> right now - a shorter path between your Python objects and publishing
> them on the web. Or a shorter path between writing some plain old
> Python code and seeing a result.
> 
> I need to read more of te other thread about this. I just know that
> there's some debate of wiehether Zope 3 should be a part of the Zope.org
> site. I'm for having it be separate. There are a lot of Python
> developers out there who have bad memories of Zope 2 but just may be
> the kind of developers who'd like or love Zope 3 if they could really
> see and understand what makes Zope 3 so great.
> 

You're absolutely right about the fact that Zope.org is missing a lot of
hype compared to the other projects you mentionned. I don't like wikis
neither myself... It's really hard to find information and to know
what's up2date or not and the visual is amazingly crap. Zope3 is really
a well documented project in itself. The only problem is the way the
information are provided to the people.

Let's wish that Zope.org (or Zope3.org) will provide a decent home that
the Zope3 project deserves.

Cheers,

	J.

P.S : Thanks for your nice comments about z3lab.org. We are at the
beginning ot the project so be sure we'll improve lots of things in the
future. Lots of things remain to be done on this portal.

- --
Julien Anguenot | Nuxeo R&D (Paris, France)
CPS Platform : http://www.cps-project.org
Zope3 / ECM   : http://www.z3lab.org
mail: anguenot at nuxeo.com; tel: +33 (0) 6 72 57 57 66
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