For me the most valuable things to read about a new (to me) software tool are detailed walkthrough examples. The incredibly simple one in the Zope documentation showing how to set up a web site with 3 userfolders was great. Also, many people will not be creating a Zope site from scratch, but will be moving their site(s) to Zope. I would think guidance on how to do this would be useful. For example, in my case, I am thinking of moving a Frontpage web with lots of active server pages to Zope. What are the implications? How do I handle the navigation? How do I name objects so I can still see the relationship with the old site. Do I move my users to Zope or give them a route via Frontpage (and how do I do that?). I am a Zope newcomer, so have all these things to do. A book giving this sort of advice would be invaluable. Neil are At 12:29 10/04/2000 +0100, Richard Moon wrote:
Perhaps you should start with a non-technical description of what Zope does. i.e that it stores things in a database, things which can be web pages but can also be more clever than that, that at the time the web page is requested any dtml tags are interpreted/rendered (is that the right word ?) to generate the final page. I think there's a tendency for newbies to think of DTML as a procedural language and forget what is actually happening. Try to avoid all the OO gobblydegook - it isn't necessary at this stage.
I think you need a really gentle introduction to namespaces/variables with lots of examples. Theres a need to explain the REQUEST variable ( a whole chapter IMHO) and how form variables get lost when you move to a new form, information about passing variables to and from SQL methods, how to use the _. and all the functions such as _.string. All of this backed up by real-world examples (starting easy and getting more complex). Using variables within dtml-let and dtml-with tags. The focus should be on 'how do I do xyz' (eg how do I take user input, check it was entered properly, upshift it, concatenate it with a constant and insert it into a database) not what a particular tag does.
Can I say that the book I would most like you to emulate would be the HTML 4.0 Sourcebook by Ian S Graham. No computer science, just what you really need to know.
Can I suggest that you make no assumptions about the previous languages the reader has. Please don't assume they have Python or C or Java or Perl or anything. I would imagine you have to assume a basic grasp of HTML and web servers etc, and of course when you talk about SQL methods and Python methods you don't want to be teaching them those languages.
Good luck !
Richard
At 17:31 07/04/00 +0200, you wrote:
Hi,
I'm going to (try!) to write a small book on Zope. I hear people complaining a lot about the documentation with Zope. I'm all ears to hear <snip> Regards, Tom.
Richard Moon richard@dcs.co.uk
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