On Fri, 2002-03-08 at 14:07, seb bacon wrote:
<snipped for your pleasure>
Have to disagree about the spam.
Hey, Fabruary has 4 messages, one about ExpoServer and another about making money on the Internet (in Spanish), and still another trying to sell a content management tool. So out of 4 messages, 3 were solicitations. And the only Zope-related message was a request for examples available as a tarball! This is not a complaint. It just looks like a dead list to me...
Those are my guesses, anyway. Here are my questions:
1) Why do so many community efforts struggle to get momentum?
Because we are all, um, er, developers. (sheepish grin)
2) What is the secret to PHP's excellent documentation?
My suspicion is that their job is made easy by everything being wrapped up in a function. That may or may not be the way they intended it, but just the function reference alone is all I need for a very healthy and productive PHP life. I can do a tremendous amount of kewl things just knowing about those functions. So, how to mirror that in the Zope world? We simply cannot. There are a heckuva lot more than just functions here - there's objects, methods, DTML, ZPT, CMF, and all that other stuff I haven't learned about yet. I'm still hazy on DTML, and moving to ZPT/CMF because of both the 2.5 release and an inferiority complex. So I am sure I am missing something. My lack of understanding of the complete Zope environment keeps me from getting my arms around a logical documentation strategy, though. Zope, in one way, makes it much easier to get started (with the ZMI, acquisition, etc.); and in another way makes it damn hard (too many of too different things to document). For example, you cannot just write a TAL reference. It will have to include significant references to ZSQL methods, which are also intimately connected to vanilla DTML. Ditto for those Python scripts that send processed data for input into the database. Is there a better way to document all these lumpy, bumpy aspects of the Z Object Publishing Environment? -- Mitch Pirtle Corporate Security Officer Kühne & Nagel Management AG Tel: +41 1 786 96 45 Fax: +41 1 786 95 95