Brian Hickman writes:
My proposal is that DC builds or blesses a detailed topic map re. knowledge of Zope (Installation, RDMS, DTML, Security, the various products, etc.) on Zope.org, and invites members to contribute to filling in the topic map with questions, answers, example code, etc. A FAQ + a topic map. ZDP
I'm a technical editor at a mid-size software company and so I might be able to speak to the question of Zope documentation. To me, what seems to be desparately lacking is a real user guide. By that, I mean a highly structured manual that is entirely focused on accomplishing common tasks and procedures, rather than on Zope concepts and API. This is not a criticism of what is available now - the more conceptual material - the Zope Book and Dieter's book - are excellent resources and required reading for anyone who wants to 'get' Zope. But (in an ideal world) there should also be a very structured set of step-by-step procedures for all of the basic tasks involved in putting together a typical site. Much of that material is there already in the HowTos but to an editor's eye the HowTos (taken as a group) are an overwhelming and utterly disorganized jumble. To do a proper user guide you would have to start from scratch and begin by working out a table of contents. In the table of contents the chapters, sections, and topic headings would not contain any references to Zope jargon (ZClasses, DTML, ZPT etc) but rather, they should be rigorously pruned down to simple objectives ("Index a Website", "Add a Navigation Bar", "Process a Form", "Connect to a SQL database" etc.). Once you have a relatively complete TOC (although obviously you can't cover everything) you can look at the existing sources - the HowTos, the Zope Book, list archives etc - and see what available material would cover the topics in the outline. To do it properly, most of the HowTos would need a great deal of pruning to get some kind of consistency, to remove the conceptual stuff (which is useful but not in this context) and to reduce them to a series of simple steps (a maximum of about ten steps per procedure). The end result would be something that would not be particularly englightening for the ZopeZen Masters who can write Python scripts in their sleep but could provide a tremendous productivity boost to the less-skilled people who can and should be doing a lot of the grunt work but need lots of handholding. I've actually been tinkering a bit with a TOC for just such a manual but I'm swamped with other projects at work and this would be almost a full time job in itself. Cheers Lee Hunter _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.