Well, that's not what Zope is trying to be, although, if it was, it's already there... but I think we appreciate the sentiment. ;-)
Hmm. For me personally, Zope is a replacement for Apache + Perl - did I make a mistake? ;-))
No.. of course not. Sorry. Most of the "documentation problem" is actually a preception problem and an organization problem. Folks (like yourself) perceive Zope to be "just 'this'", where 'this' is a very specific thing. In your case, it's a replacement for Apache and perl. You likely expect to see things in the docs about how to run a CGI script, how to untaint form variables, and maybe how to hook Zope up to MySQL. However, you need to do none of these things to use Zope. Zope doesn't serve CGI, you don't need to untaint formvars, and you don't need to use a relational database to make a dynamic website using Zope. Zope's got its own webserver, its got its own object database. Compound this problem with sets of folks coming to Zope from Vignette StoryServer, from Mason, from OpenACS, and from a J2EE world. All of these folks have different expectations of what Zope really is, what it does, and how it should work. This multipurposing confuses the bejeezus out of people when they first come to Zope, because there's no way a single set of docs could possibly serve all of those audiences. We'd need to write maybe four or five different sets of documentation to service all of these audiences. We can't do this for financial reasons. But people flounder aimlessly due to the disconnect and get very upset. Zope is different than the combination of Perl and apache (or insert your favorite dynamic website software here), so much different that you need to look at the problem you're attempting to solve a little differently to apply Zope to it. You need to get a conceptual understanding of the object database and how methods are called on Zope objects and lots of other stuff. This is a liability sometimes when all you want to do is "get it working" and you have little Zope experience. But I don't know of a quick fix other than pointing folks at the appropriate docs when they ask. - C