I'm also new to Zope, but I agree that having "transitional" manuals would be helpful. I'd like to see one that shifts traditional web developers into Zope by tackling the differences head on. I don't think that the Zope book http://serenade.4-am.com/ZopeBook actually does this. It certainly is helpful and provides a gradual introduction to Zope, but really what I want to see is how things should best be done the Zope way. I think I would have been better off starting with chapter 12 of this same book ("Extending Zope"). This chapter introduces ZClasses and shows how to create a product that would allow for a web presentation, user entry through the management interface, etc. For the longest time I couldn't "get" how I would do something as simple as create a recipe card file with Zope. Zope is a total mind-shift from traditional web development/database tools so hit it head on and show a complete development of a generic web site doing things entirely the Zope way. I found it hard to make the mental transition when looking at nothing but DTML since it looks like many of the other systems I've been familiar with (just another tagged based meta-language) but it's not. It's tied into Zope's incredible object database and management interface. Just my two cents... BTW: Don't get me wrong, this book was an absolute godsend! Todd -----Original Message----- From: Chris McDonough [mailto:chrism@digicool.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2001 10:26 AM To: Philippe Jadin; zope@zope.org Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: [Zope] beginner
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.
What could be good however : have a "how to make the transition" guide for differents origins. Maybe ask some experienced zope users who were using different tools before the discovered zope. Having for example a simple app written in php and then with zope, idem for coldfusion and others... But imho if you take the time to read and understand the zope book you get all of this and a lot more.
Yes... unless you really want to do something very specific to a particular system... like.. use regexes in Perl. You'd need to search almost forever to figure out how to expose regex functionality in Zope without using an external method. There are lots of other examples like this. All we can do is rely on the community and the maillist here.
something different :
I had to search the php.net site for a particular function, and I found what is so cool about this site : users can search any php function very easily, and most important : *visitors can add comments and examples* to the function explanation.
This could be added to the zope docs imho. One folder per function, and let the users add their own comments (guestbook like).
How about http://serenade.4-am.com/ZopeBook? This Zope Book instance is going away, so don't get too carried away adding comments... but if you like it, *please* let the Zope docs folks know that you'd like to get the Zope Book annotation/bugtracking system out of the SourceForge tracker and into this system by emailing docs@digicool.com .
something more different :
why not add a guestbook-like system to every page of zope.org? This way we could read the experience of other users about the current page.
This is the purpose of the CMF Discussion system (an example of which the above is *not*). - C _______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )