-----Original Message----- From: Lindon Parker [mailto:twomoonlp@hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 1999 10:04 PM To: zope@zope.org Subject: [Zope] Re: getting some documentation going:(getting long here..)

This reply tells me how great ZCatalogue is(how fast etc. etc.) and how I can work with ZClasses(if I design them "right"). In effect this is a piece of either developer enthusiasm(always good to see) or marketing blurb(and if your frustrated already you can easily pick this option - I'm choosing not to by the way). So what this doesn't do is tell me how to search Zope objects by attribute value, which was the question I asked. It is in turns too much information and too little.

You're right.

So what I want to see is a simple piece of code that lets me search my Zope database where I can, as a complete novice, substitute my objects and my attributes to get back a list of things I can itterate over.

Method A: <form action="B"> <input type=text name="PrincipiaSearchSource"> <input type=submit value=" Search "> </form> Method B: <dtml-in Catalog> <dtml-let URL="getpath(data_record_id_)"> <a href="<dtml-var URL>"><dtml-var URL></a> </dtml-let> </dtml-in> Will create a simple search box form that let's you free text search all of the objects in the Catalog ('PrincipiaSearchSource' is the attribute to get searchable content from text objects like DTML Documents/Methods. The Principia should probably get whacked). To actually *Catalog* objects go to the Catalog, click on 'Find Objects' and enter the find criteria for the Catalog. It's quite intuitive (of course, I wrote it, it might be clear as mud to you)

Lets ignore perfomance, b-tree's, ZClass design etc. etc. Assume I have NOT installed ZCatalogue(unless of course it comes by default on my NT Zope 2.0 install, does it?), and I'm using DTML Documents. In short assume I am

Yes it does. The final 2.0 release will come with a Catalog pre-indexed to the default Zope content for you to play with.

an idiot(you wont be so far wrong) but I need to get something working pretty quickly, and I'll make it graceful later.

OK now the specifics are out of the way I want to quickly offer up a view on why we need to stop the development process(or slow it down severely) and address the documentation issue.

We have similar needs, altough not necesarily competition driven. We need to move onto more consulting work which will require more documentation for our paying customers. Otherwise we loose money answering questions that could just be documented.

it WILL ship with VERY VERY good documentation. In fact the ticket price isn't such a differentiator either; anyone (including you guys at DC) who thinks Zope is free is really fooling themseleves, ticket price is but one(small) component in the overall cost of software, poor documentation is another soaring cost to organisations such as ours.

I wouldn't say poor documentation is a cost, but it is a contributing factor to high costs. As an example, it took me about three man-days (over the course ofa week) to find enough documentation on the new Linux software RAID to get it right. ALl the faqs, howtos, and source docs were out of day. In fact, there were three 'official' RAID homepages, each with a different version of the software at various points in it's development stages and for various kernels. It was maddening. I know how you feel. Trust me, we're on it. We're not sitting back and ignoring all of these threads on documentation. There are also some recent developments that cannot be discussed at the moment (think bound sheets of paper) that will bring us into a serious light with people who like docs. -Michel