Here's my general take on spending about a week looking for good Zope documention (from a newbie perspective)...Pardon me if this is too obvious. I'm finding that Zope documentation has these common problems: I finally found the How-To's by a roundabout route - I would search Google for "Zope" and my subject, then I'd find these wonderful How-To's, but, they all seemed to be owned by separate authors and there were no links from each How-To back to a master table of contents, nor an index. Each page was by itself and had no hooks to any other documentation. It seemed in every case I was at the end of the documentation line. I didn't know where the "master list" of these things were. Eventually I came to find the Docs link on the Zope.org site. Then I found that the "basic" how-to's which applied to me are sometimes old and thus hard to find (initially). I found that by going to Docs, All How-To's, then setting the Batch Size box to the total # of entries, I could scroll to the bottom of the entire list and start finding the stuff I wanted to read, like: Gotchas for Zope Beginners 2000/10/16 jens Zope Installation Choices 2000/08/24 guy_davis Z Catalog Tutorial 2000/10/16 Amos The DTML Name Space How-To 2000/10/16 michel Getting Started With DTML Scripting 2000/10/16 Pam You get the idea... notice the dates on these. Unfortunately for this layout, the how-to's get more complex as time passes. So as a new Zope user, I initially see a bunch of high-level stuff at the top which usually isn't basic information. Almost enough to make me give up because I spend all my time searching for documentation relevant to my skill level. I have to dig to find the "good newbie stuff" at the bottom. This makes sense in terms of "starting at the bottom" for new people, and allows people more versed in the product to "find the latest" at the top, however the ordering as it is, is "static", appealing to one mindset. It is limiting. Perhaps rating systems and voting on the most popular/helpful documents is the answer? The other thing I'd like to mention is that I haven't yet found an INDEX for this stuff - like the kind you'd find in a good book. Are there no keywords for these documents? Must I forever be performing text or Google searches on everything? I come across the good docs *almost always* as a result of someone making a URL mention in an email. It's almost a shame that subscribing to a mailing list is the best way to find where the documentation is. Lists are a good thing, don't get me wrong, but still...not everyone knows the value of mailing lists, or has the time to scan everything. I'd like to see some sort of knowledge-base product for Zope documentation, something that would open up the Zope world to me by asking "What level are you? Beginner? Well then, here's what you need to be looking at to make you smarter." "This How-To rated Beginner." or "Warning: complex subject ahead." With "rating systems" then I could do the driving, rather than me having to adapt to how someone else decided the documents should be presented. Maybe then I could avoid wading through the latest greatest information which is often tantalizing but ultimately confusing for my beginner status. I'm not after slamming Zope.org or the documentation itself. I have the same problems finding stuff every time I undertake document research. I just have this feeling that Zope can do all this and more. Is it already being done? I propose that a few documentation implementation standards would go a long way to helping the community at large: 1: indexes of document collections 2: keywords for searching (same as index, really) 3: tagging the document with the level of the target audience knowledge level (beginner, intermediate, advanced) 4: listing the Zope version/date which was current at the time of the document's creation 5: screenshots of the product or diagrams (yeah, I ask a lot) Thanks for the forum. I plan to buy some books soon and climb out of this primordial Zope/Python soup so I can stand among you. :-) -Patrick Price West Virginia University PS: Another problem (presentation-wise and not functional-wise, and easily corrected) with the Zope.org how-to's is the alternating grey/white layout. While viewing the list of HowTo's, one howto is grey background, the next white, the next grey. While visually pleasing, this format doesn't make the Subject stand out. One Subject is grey, the next white, etc. I think the subjects should have their own background color.