I think folks need to start becoming more specific when they say "Zope isn't well documented".
Chris, The following is a rant :-) Read the recent Digital Creations survey. Lack of documentation is by far the most prominent complaint. That's not random people bitchin', that's statistics :-) Zope Book was no good before it went through editorial process. Developers in DC write excellent software but horrible docs. They need an editor to tell them that documentation is not only about pure definitions, but it actually needs examples (and more examples <and yet more examples>). And it needs repeating things that were already mentioned elsewhere in the book, because people forget. Some people outside DC (or at least myself) are not as bright as DC people. Now that we have CMF, DC is doing the same mistake as if it never learned anything. There are no docs, just random data in the fishbowl. Just look at it from a moron's perspective (a moron like myself) and you won't be able to make any sense of the docs scatterer around fishbowl. CMF is very exciting but I decided to not touch it before there are any good docs. Standardised, revised, edited docs. A year ago I suggested (to Amos, I think) that DC hires a full time technical writer, or a bunch of writers, or contract them. DC replied that they will consider this idea. What happened instead was that the programmers (Michel Pelletier and Amos Latteier) wrote the Zope Book, and it required a long editorial process to make it readable and easily understandable. In my humble opinion you should not let programmers write the documentation. I am a poor programmer. I take very long to write a program. I enjoy writing documentation. But bright, effective programmers do not enjoy it. Forgive this rant. I would not write it if I did not care about DC and Zope. In my opinion, the documentation, be it Zope development, CMF, or Products, is not something DC could be complacent about or satisfied with. Best regards -- Milos Prudek