Hi Michel! On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Michel Pelletier wrote:
chas wrote:
That said, are there other particular lessons that you think we should learn from CF/Spectra?
Let me go off on a tangent for a moment :
I got up to speed on CF instantaneously because I knew what it was supposed to do (and what I intended to do) before installing the software.
So, perhaps that's part of the reason people have so much trouble. Zope is a new 'product category' for many. Here's part of an email somebody sent me privately after I mentioned zope on another
Recently I've been meditating on a comment from Jon Udell:
"It is completely feasible for a novice to download Zope, install it, and build a simple site -- even one that leverages the object hierarchy to factor out repetitive pieces -- without writing any code. And the result is 100% Web-manageable."
This could be a start.
-Michel
I've been using Zope for almost a month now and I have just thought I might let you know how I have learnt how to use Zope over the time. 1) Firstly I did exactly as above - simply used it as a web interface for 'hand hacked' html files. 2) It then got to the point where I wanted to change the look and feel of the site and realised - hang on, if I shove all this stuff in standard_html_header and standard_html_foter I won't have to change each file, fantastic. I think even if this is all you use Zope for it is already a huge timesaver. (By the way the time to go from stage 1 to stage 2 was about 5 minutes, but that I still think they are two distinct learning stages) 3) After the site grew somewhat I wanted to add a better navigation tools for the site. Once again I started to learn more DTML, <dtml-in>, <dtml-with> etc.. 4) Realised that a lot of my pages shouldn't really be DTML docs, since they all basically have the same information 'structure' it would be much better if I made a class for it, then I could change the look of all these pages in 5 seconds. This is when I discovered and used ZClasses 5) Not here yet, I know of external methods, but haven't come across a need for them yet, though I'm sure I will in the near future :) Now to the point of my story. I don't think you need to go out and learn everything about zope to start of, as you face new problems you learn a new set of skills which save you a lot of time in the future, working smarter not harder. Now it could maybe be possible to break down a tutorial into stages or steps of funtionality along the way so that new users aren't overwhelmed by all the information in the beginning. Cheers, Ben Leslie (PS: When I finish my current project at work I might actually act on some of the ideas i put forward here :)