This multipurposing confuses the bejeezus out of people when they first come to Zope, because there's no way a single set of docs could possibly serve all of those audiences. We'd need to write maybe four or five different sets of documentation to service all of these audiences. We can't do this for financial reasons.
What could be good however : have a "how to make the transition" guide for differents origins. Maybe ask some experienced zope users who were using different tools before the discovered zope. Having for example a simple app written in php and then with zope, idem for coldfusion and others... But imho if you take the time to read and understand the zope book you get all of this and a lot more.
Yes... unless you really want to do something very specific to a particular system... like.. use regexes in Perl. You'd need to search almost forever to figure out how to expose regex functionality in Zope without using an external method. There are lots of other examples like this. All we can do is rely on the community and the maillist here.
something different :
I had to search the php.net site for a particular function, and I found what is so cool about this site : users can search any php function very easily, and most important : *visitors can add comments and examples* to the function explanation.
This could be added to the zope docs imho. One folder per function, and let the users add their own comments (guestbook like).
How about http://serenade.4-am.com/ZopeBook? This Zope Book instance is going away, so don't get too carried away adding comments... but if you like it, *please* let the Zope docs folks know that you'd like to get the Zope Book annotation/bugtracking system out of the SourceForge tracker and into this system by emailing docs@digicool.com .
something more different :
why not add a guestbook-like system to every page of zope.org? This way we could read the experience of other users about the current page.
This is the purpose of the CMF Discussion system (an example of which the above is *not*). - C