Hi Jason ! Jason Cunliffe wrote:

Ok its hot here in the city today ...and I am going @#$%@ nuts trying to find specific help on various topics in zope.

The ZDP is trying to solve this problem. You can find the new Zope Documentation Portal at http://zdp.zope.org

I know the advice exists "_.{'("['some.where']")'}" in all the great mesasges and howtos and tips whcih have accrued over the past couple years.

On ZDP you can narrow down your search by going down a Subject Topic hierarchy that starts with a specific community. Stuff that is interesting for specific communities is separated from stuff that is interesting for other communities.

Q1: Why oh why oh why oh why when you go to Zope http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Tips does it only display the first 32 characters of the How-to desciption? This is not 1980! People have taken the trouble to write a descriptive title and you can't even read it in full .. what is the sense in that?

Absolutely right ! We are working hard on the ZDP project to mirror the stuff from the main Zope site and make the ZDP the only resource for Zope documentation. Digital Creations has a Documentation Plan, but they don't have the man power to make it happen soon. The problem is that the ZDP also does not have the man power to do very much, and we are struggling very hard to make it easier for people to find the stuff they need. I do have some scripts ready to make XML from all the Tips on Zope.org, but I still need to program a small tool to upload this XML to the ZDP.

Q2: Why is it not possible to see the whole thing as one scrollable list? Why is not possible to group these at least superficially by catgory?

To do this you would have to assign all tips a category. At the ZDP portal we have lots of documents that still need a Subject and Topic, and we also have to tag the stuff from Zope.org. Once the stuff is in the ZDP site, we can define different views on the stuff - no problem. On the ZDP site we are in control of Documentation, and can defines as many views as we want.

Q3: Why is there no infoseek-like search engine which allows an intial search, and then search within again to narrow things down. I find typically this mechanism is by far the most effective way to egt to the information one wants in the fastest possible time.

I would be interested to create something like this for the ZDP, but I have other things that have much higher priority. In the ZDP, you go from Subjects for a community to topics, and from there you either find the stuff on ZDP, or you get some predefined searches on top with which you can find really great results (You'll have to try it to see what I mean.)

For example search for 'External'. Then search within for 'python', then search agin within those results for 'import' etc... Why please can someone explain to me why this is so hard to do? I thought that infoseek's engine was written in Python or a big chunk of it..

To demonstrate how a search on the ZDP site works, let me take another example (For DTML there is already some tagged information). If you are a User that is interested in DTML and Tags, then you would go to the User Portal, click on DTML and then on Tags. The ZDP has some Snippets and FAQ Questions on this Subject and Topic, so you can look there for a solution. But you are also not stuck there. There are searches to search the following search engines: Zope.org CodeCatalog eGroups Google The searches are predefined for the Subject and Topic: eGroups: Search for DTML and Tags Search for DTML Search for Tags I have found this extremely useful. It can be improved, and I would like to hear some suggestions on what else can be done.

Q4: Why not show off Zope by having a nice Zope search interface to searching itself? The new Nip is an improvement on things but still very hard to sift through the results.

The best search is useless if the information is not enriched with enough meta information. This is hard to do after there are already many documents which are not tagged.

Q5: Why for @$%@'s sake is there no organization, structure or search for Zope prodcuts at http://www.zope.org/Products ?

On the ZDP, we are planning to have a Portal for every Project, where the community of Users can exchange their experiences. Indeed, every Subject and Topic will could have it's community, and for each there could be Discussions on the website. We need to give a great service to the Zope community, and that will take some hard work. I am planning to open up the Portal for contributions by visitors. Visitors can already add Subjects, Topics, Comments, FAQ Questions and Answers and Drafts.

For example 'Member Contributed Products' appear to be listed neither by name nor topic nor author nor date... what's with that. The zen of searching zope appears to be 'when you find it you will know'.. How hard is it to put some useful structure on this?

I have done it with the stuff on ZDP, and I can tell you that it is very hard to categorize things in a nice fashion. You can try it on your own if you want, I can give you a login to the ZDP site.

How many newbie email posts would be saved by an accessible presentation? If Zope is so powerful why can't it be configured to show it's own stuff more clearly.

Document Management is a really hard problem, which Zope does not try to solve ! Zope is an application Server, and a Content management system, but it is not a Document Management system. It can be done with Zope, but Zope does not have specialized tools for this. The ZDP-Tools have grown from a system for uploading Drafts for ZBook and managing the ZDP FAQs and Snippets to a Portal for the Zope communities. The Portal that you can see now on ZDP has been developed in the last 7 days in my spare time.

Q6: Am I the only one who finds all this very strange?

I guess not :-)

I love the 'idea' of zope and really want to learn to use it as a basis for many projects, but am finding I am being driven towards researching other solutions, simply because I cannot afford the time, [dealy/expense] and frustration of constantly seeking some valid examples quickly of the syntax. As an interim I turning to learn to use Python Methods and External Methods as a better solution, since at least that way it is easier to develop and read.

Each Portal has a quick intro leading the reader to the "good stuff". This has to be done for each Subject and Topic as well. If you have a tree with 6 Portals, each with 6 Subjects and 6 Topics, then you have 36 Subjects and 216 Topics, which sums up to 258 nodes for which to provide the service of pointing to the good stuff. This can only be done collaboratively with the whole Zope community.

In know Zope is free and I cannot complain. But imho there is a serious obstacle to its broader growth which is the learning curve. My impression is that a major obstacle to willing newbies is simply decent access to the archives via some smart zope-based search tools.

Search is not everything. You need to point each community to the resources they need. Zope Evaluators, Users, Administrators, Developers, Hackers and SIGs need their own point for exchanging ideas and helping each other to learn about Zope.

I draw 3 conclusions:

1. I am simply too dumb and too lazy to trawl though gadzillion threads to find my info

Then I invite everyone join the ZDP, and once they have found the info come back and share it in the Community under the Subject and Topic !

2. Zope has some serious problems and cannot really do what needs to be done in terms of dynamic search and presentation

The ZDP has the aim of doing just that. We are not there yet, but with your help, and our ZDP-Tools we can get where we want to be !

3. Digital Creations are too busy/tired etc to put time in for free to get the web site advanced like this

Digital Creations should open the Documentation and let the ZDP be the only resource for documentation !

4. No-one has really applied themselves to the problem. Those who know don't need it and the rest struggle along

The ZDP has been doing so since a very long time, and has produced great resources like the ZQR. We are now in a position to solve to problem once and for all times, but we need your help !

Wht do you think ?

Thanks a lot for your email, which gave me the chance to present my ideas on this topic from the ZDP point of view. I think that all further discussion on this topic needs to be done on the ZDP mailing list at zdp@zope.org. Greetings, Maik Röder

Jason, Here's what I do: - I keep archives of the mail list in text files on my hard drive (you can download the archived text files from http://www.zope.org/Resources/MailingLists -- click on the [archive] link next to each mail list). - When I need to figure out a syntax issue I'm not sure about, I grep this archive rather than trying to page through the DTML guide/SQL guide/etc. Though I've not used it there is also a PDF version of all the howtos gathered together at http://www.zope.org/Members/AlexR/All-Zope-Howtos.zip. Having this document locally to search through might be easier than searching Zope.org for the answers. I came across the same issues when I first encountered Zope (see http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/gainenlightenment). I'm still frustrated a lot of times by how hard it is to find information, and I work for the company who makes the thing. I think there are two main factors causing our frustration: - It's been conceded many, many times that Zope documentation is seriously lacking. Part of documentation is presentation and organization. Finding stuff is hard due to spotty documentation whose holes have been (thankfully) filled in by community members in a variety of forums -- HowTos, email posts, their own personal home pages, the ZDP project, and most lately, an ever-growing number of Wikis. Obviously, having so much information spread across so many different places makes it much harder to find an answer to specific questions. Consolidating this information is *hard*. The ZDP has been doing a pretty great job of scoping out a presentation skeleton on their portal and taking on the Herclean task of filling that skeleton in with useful information. Amos and Michel have been making progress on DC's Documentation Project as well (http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Projects/Projects). Personally, I'm leaning towards agreeing with Maik that we should make ZDP the primary source for Zope docs, integrating it into Zope.org somehow. But this requires time on both sides, and both DC and the ZDP group are lacking it. We don't want to do something that we know we can't sustain in the long term. As broken as documentation is right now, it's highly available and loosely maintained. It's definitely, however, not well organized. - Zope is huge. It's a webserver, a content management system, a search engine, an object database, an application server, and an object-oriented web development framework. It provides the full services of two server-side programming languages as well as allowing for client-side presentation through HTML, XML, CSS, WAP, etc. It provides services over HTTP, XML-RPC, FTP, and WebDAV. It lets you arbitrarily connect to Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Solid, ODBC, MySQL, and Postgres databases. It has a security system that allows arbitrary users to write code through the web. User-contributed products extend Zope to deliver features DC never even thought about. Granted, not all of these things are documented as well as we would like. But, even if they were, it would *still* be hard to learn because its scope is just so broad. Digital Creations employs now something like... 28 people. Or something like that. Every one of those people is a fanatic about Zope. We hear what you're saying. Everybody from the salespeople to the COO acknowledges that documentation and documentation organization is a problem. We've committed resources to help alleviate the problem. But we need help! I encourage you, if you like Zope and you can afford it, to get involved in the ZDP. If you *can't* afford it, and you just need to do fairly simple things (and I hate to say this), you just *might* be better off using something simpler like PHP or ASP or what-have-you that have much narrower scopes and are therefore a little less time-consuming to learn the ins-and-outs of. Jason Cunliffe wrote:

Ok its hot here in the city today ...and I am going @#$%@ nuts trying to find specific help on various topics in zope. I know the advice exists "_.{'("['some.where']")'}" in all the great mesasges and howtos and tips whcih have accrued over the past couple years.

Q1: Why oh why oh why oh why when you go to Zope http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Tips does it only display the first 32 characters of the How-to desciption? This is not 1980! People have taken the trouble to write a descriptive title and you can't even read it in full .. what is the sense in that?

Q2: Why is it not possible to see the whole thing as one scrollable list? Why is not possible to group these at least superficially by catgory?

Q3: Why is there no infoseek-like search engine which allows an intial search, and then search within again to narrow things down. I find typically this mechanism is by far the most effective way to egt to the information one wants in the fastest possible time. For example search for 'External'. Then search within for 'python', then search agin within those results for 'import' etc... Why please can someone explain to me why this is so hard to do? I thought that infoseek's engine was written in Python or a big chunk of it..

Q4: Why not show off Zope by having a nice Zope search interface to searching itself? The new Nip is an improvement on things but still very hard to sift through the results.

Q5: Why for @$%@'s sake is there no organization, structure or search for Zope prodcuts at http://www.zope.org/Products ? For example 'Member Contributed Products' appear to be listed neither by name nor topic nor author nor date... what's with that. The zen of searching zope appears to be 'when you find it you will know'.. How hard is it to put some useful structure on this? How many newbie email posts would be saved by an accessible presentation? If Zope is so powerful why can't it be configured to show it's own stuff more clearly.

Q6: Am I the only one who finds all this very strange?

I love the 'idea' of zope and really want to learn to use it as a basis for many projects, but am finding I am being driven towards researching other solutions, simply because I cannot afford the time, [dealy/expense] and frustration of constantly seeking some valid examples quickly of the syntax. As an interim I turning to learn to use Python Methods and External Methods as a better solution, since at least that way it is easier to develop and read.

In know Zope is free and I cannot complain. But imho there is a serious obstacle to its broader growth which is the learning curve. My impression is that a major obstacle to willing newbies is simply decent access to the archives via some smart zope-based search tools. I draw 3 conclusions:

1. I am simply too dumb and too lazy to trawl though gadzillion threads to find my info 2. Zope has some serious problems and cannot really do what needs to be done in terms of dynamic search and presentation 3. Digital Creations are too busy/tired etc to put time in for free to get the web site advanced like this 4. No-one has really applied themselves to the problem. Those who know don't need it and the rest struggle along

Wht do you think ?

- Jason

________________________________________________________________ Jason CUNLIFFE = NOMADICS.(Interactive Art and Technology).Design Director

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