On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 11:04:12PM +0100, Mark Barratt wrote:
John Poltorak wrote:
I was on a course over the weekend where ordinary people in their 70's with no technical ability were knocking together websites in just a few hours with no prior training and no understanding of the underlying concepts involved. Why should Zope be just as easy?
Because Zope is hard. You can make some great sites/applications with Zope but for all except the very simplest you need
. advanced understanding of html and xml or . a thorough grounding in programming principles or . a working knowledge of Python
- and preferably all three.
Whilst Zope can be used for developing extremely complex sites, that shouldn't preclude it as a development tool for simple sites. I think expertise only develops through extended usage of Zope, but there is just so much to learn, although I don't see a need to be an expert in numerous fields before touching Zope.
Most (not all) of the people who hang out here have all three of these skill sets, and like many skilled people, they find it hard to understand that the skills they have seem arcane to beginners. You should also understand that nobody (AFAIK) is 'them' with an interest in making Zope easy and helping you. You depend on the kindness of strangers, so politeness and gratitude pay.
Yes, I am aware of this. I also think that this list is not really appropriate for newbies, but in the absence of an alternative, this is where I ask my newbie questions.
In addition, Zope is heading fast into even less friendly territory. DTML, which is technically 'mucky' but reasonably easy to grasp for non-programmers, is increasingly deprecated. Through-the-web editing likewise. I'm not saying these trends are bad, just that they are happening, they make the learning curve steeper, and that they lock out almost all casual users unless they have the skills noted above.
The alternative in the Zope world is Plone, where you can get a site up and rolling in very little time (as long as you are happy for it to look and operate like almost every other Plone site on the planet).
I looked at Plone but it is way too slow for the server I'm using. Besides that customisation looks like another learning cliff.
or there's PHP, where the communities are probably more newbie-friendly and there are loads of tutorials.
I'm sufficiently aware of Zope to know it provides a far more comprehensive build environment than PHP ever will and I would like to adopt it as my platform of choice, but it would be nice if the ZOPE support community was as newbie-friendly as the PHP crowd. Loads of tutorials and worked examples would be nice too. Reading a manual is no substitute for being shown how to build a web page using ZOPE and just reading through dozens of isolated examples of ZPT techniques makes progress very slow. I would much rather see a tutorial which starts of with a relatively complex but easily reproducible template which creates an interesting page, but then proceeds to de-construct what it does and how it does it.
or you could decide that Zope does some stuff which you must have, in which case David H's stereotypical response
If you spent more time just *learning* Zope and HTML, etc and less time rationalizing your lack of progress everyone would be happy.
is appropriate.
I only need to rationlise it when people constantly keep telling me to read the Zope Book as if that is the solution to everything. Fortunately there are a few people here who can still remember suffering the same plight as I am currently in an I'm grateful to them for their help.
Good luck.
-- Mark Barratt Text Matters
Information design: we help explain things using language | design | systems | process improvement ______________________________________________________ phone +44 (0)118 986 8313 email markb@textmatters.com skype mark_barratt web http://www.textmatters.com
-- John