The Zope Book says this in its preface FWIW: To make effective use of the book, you should know how to use a web browser and you should have a basic understanding of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). You don't need to be a highly-skilled programmer in order to use Zope, but some programming background (particularly object-oriented programming) will be extremely helpful. On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 09:04 +0100, Mark Barratt wrote:
Andreas Jung wrote:
--On 21. Juni 2005 23:04:12 +0100 Mark Barratt <markb@textmatters.com> wrote:
or there's PHP, where the communities are probably more newbie-friendly and there are loads of tutorials.
Don't compare PHP with Zope. PHP is a tiny language compared to the fat Zope frameworks. Working with Zope on the scripter level (ZPT, DTMl, ZSQL) requires similar skills as a PHP programmer. If you want to go beyond you have approach open-minded and come a with some solid knowledge in programming and understanding architectural issues in Zope. But when I read some questions here then I have the impression that people except that Zope solves their problems although neither they don't understand the problems themselves nor have the basic skills to reach the goal. That's not a but being newbie-friendly but one can expect as certain level of knowledge when you're working with Zope...e.g. the knowledge how HTML works (that's something kids learn at school nowadays).
I agree with all this, though I suspect you underestimate how little many newcomers know, and not just about HTML, where they may have been inflicted with Front Page or learned in Dreamweaver, where you don't have to either write code or do things 'properly'. But also about the big leap required to get from <title>Something</title> to <title tal:content="template/title|context/title">Untitled Document</title>.
I think we (the Zope community) should try to be clearer in telling newcomers what the 'entry requirements' are.