Hi, I've been reading the comments around making Zope 10 times bigger with interest - excellent stuff. Not sure if zope-dev is the place for this, but all the other 10x conversation is here..... Some of you may know that I was pretty involved in NIP's Zope efforts a while ago but have since moved into another area, leaving it in the capable hands of Chris W and Andy D. I still have an interest in Zope both for my personal projects, and because I wish I could use it in my current role :-) Anyway, looking from the semi-outside, I suspect one quick way to make Zope a lot more popular is to package it up in a number of installations which solve a particular problem. Some of us get into Zope because its neat and interesting technology, but most start from wanting to solve a particular problem. For example: - "I want to run something like Slashdot" - "I'd like to run a simple community site for my local club" - "I would like to maintain a web site as painlessly as possible, with some useful functionality" - "I would like to keep a list of my MP3s and serve them out to my home network" - etc. I would suggest if we spend some time looking at those scenarios, and prepared Zope distributions which got people working as quickly as possible, we'd see a lot of interest. Put them up on Freshmeat as their own projects, pointing direct to the relevant page on zope.org. Most other Open Source solutions require a fair amount of installation of different components, which is a fair amount of hassle. Zope has a lot going for it as the basis for a package solution, as it can be completely self contained, and very easily integrated in with Apache if required. Currently, if you want to do anything interesting with Zope, you have to install Zope and then assemble the solution for yourself from a whole bunch of other products. This doesn't have to happen, its just how Zope is currently distributed. (I know there's some work happening on product management infrastructure, but not only will that take time to happen, it also doesn't solve the problem of the documentation etc. which should also be oriented to the specific problem area.) Once someone downloads an scenario-specific version of Zope and puts it to use, chances are their interest will grow and they will start to use it for other things. But that will only happen once they've solved their initial problem. I don't think preparing such distributions will be too hard. "All" it requires is someone to write some documentation and prepare an installation for Win32 and Linux (and possibly MacOS X for the discerning users). I don't even think we need to be too worried about keeping the distributions updated with the latest & greatest Zope + bits, because unless the new version beings something dramatically useful (or is an important security update) it doesn't matter. To prepare these scenario-specific distributions, I believe we need a series of people who are familiar with the particular problem domain and are willing to build distributions, write documentation, and answer domain-specific questions if there are any. I have almost done this for the Open Source ELN (http://www.opensourceeln.org) and will post a recipie on how to create a Win32 distribution in a week or so which other people can use. The documentation will be something like "Install this file, then go to this URL, join the site (it is a CMF-based thing) and enjoy. If you want to get into customisation, you want to mess with the templates you can see at this URL (the skins folder). If you want to know what is going on, read this document and the rest of Zope.org". Short and simple. What do people think? Do you think scenario-specific distributions would have helped you get into Zope? How did you get into Zope? Would/Could you prepare a distribution for people sharing the same problem you started with? Simon --------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ---------- Simon J. Coles Email: simon@nipltd.com New Information Paradigms Work Phone: +44 1344 753703 http://www.nipltd.com/ Work Fax: +44 1344 753742 =============== Life is too precious to take seriously ===============