Martijn Pieters writes:
At 03:50 23/09/99 , Dody Gunawinata wrote:
I think "DOCUMENTATION" is more than anything else, the greatest barrier to people using Zope. Probably Zope is too powerful for its own good. You've got this tons of features that you can exploit, so much of good thing, but there is currently no document that actually guides a beginner gently and hides the more advance features from them.
As a new zope user I agree with you. [snip]
Much of the documentation is designed with *advance* developers in mind. It's time for Zope for Dummies.
I've thought a lot about that. I'd rather have something a little less "dumbed down" than that, but something lower level would be nice.
Zope was designed for Web Application Developers, not designers. The documentation follows this design. I actually feel that dummies should stay away from Zope. Frontpage is for dummies.
This reminds me of the annoying attitude of many Linux users: "It should be difficult to use--let's not make it easy for beginners." As long as the power of the tool is not reduced, making things easy is always good. In this case, Dody was speaking of documentation. The documentation assumes an awful lot and is poorly organized. Suppose someone were to write a book on Zope and DTML--say a good users manual, complete to introduction to the syntax and a decent explanation of inheritance and probably a short intro to python, too. How would this detract from your experience? It would just make Zope easier for developers to get started. Is this bad? You can't have a successful product and only let experienced users play. Every experienced user starts out inexperienced. Zope is such an unusual paradigm that very few designers are going to come in with a strong intuitive understanding of it.
As far as DTML editing goes: DTML was designed to put a face on the application, not so much as to be used on its own. DTML is very powerful for this, but its features also make it unsuitable for WISYWIG editing.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I fail to see any relevance to the question at hand. Documentation and WYSIWYG editing are orthogonal. One can have either without the other. -- --Michael