[Zope3-Users] Re: Zope 3 Ready for Production? Really?

[Martin Aspeli]

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006 01:51:50 -0000, Jeff Shell  
<eucci.group at gmail.com> wrote:

> I like Trac, or even the Plone (I assume) based tools Schoolbell is
> using to publish information. "This is the 3.2 milestone. Here are the
> proposals and issues that are tied to that milestone" You can do this
> with Wikis, but it's all manual and the organization is seldom as nice
> and natural. Compare these (and yes, I'm aware that trac has a wiki -
> but it seems nice and secondary to some of the core information):
> http://trac.turbogears.org/turbogears/roadmap
> http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/RoadMap

For what it's worth, we used to use a Wiki for documentation and  
CMFCollector for bug tracking. The former became a mess because no-one  
gardened it, and the latter became the reason plone.org was slow as a dog.

So now, we use trac for bug tracking, the PloneHelpCenter for  
documentation - see http://plone.org/documentation - and the  
PloneSoftwareCenter http://plone.org/products for managing software,  
including Plone itself, see http://plone.org/roadmap. (Note that plone.org  
runs the unreleased 2.1-integration branch of each of these, but a release  
will be made as soon as we iron out a few remaining issues). We wrote  
these tools with the goal to make it as easy for people to contribute,  
with as little maintenance work needed as possible. There is a review  
cycle, but it's fairly light-weight, and beyond that, the tools keep  
things in order fairly well on their own.

Probably some of this would be overkill to you, and the idea of using  
Plone and Zope 2 to run your documentation site may be a little backward,  
but the tools are there, they're open source, and they're free.

Beyond that, Philipp recently blogged about the quality of zope.org. I  
must say I agree with him - unless you know what you're looking for,  
zope.org is hardly going to get you excited about what I believe is one of  
the best appservers out there for a lot of use cases. The Introduction to  
Zope page seems to still be in Zope 2 land. There's a DTML section on the  
front page. The Zope Book is outdated and covers Zope 2.6. Zope 3 is only  
found under the "Developers" section, far down the left hand column. I  
understand all too well that people's spare time doesn't extend to making  
a new kick-ass website, but honestly, we'd probably have more adopters and  
less confusion if Zope.org told a better story. Maybe it's worth trying to  
get some money together and pay someone to do it? Maybe it's worth  
starting from scratch e.g. with Plone 2.1 (you run an old version of Plone  
now, I believe) or a Z3 CMS (even better!), have someone impose some  
structure and keep old.zope.org alive for a while. I don't know. But I  
think the external face of Zope may be one reason why Zope 3 doesn't feel  
"enterprise ready" (whatever that means).

Martin

-- 
(muted)