Well Gijs, you've got some points right in what you're saying BUT... If you know some HTML and Stylesheets why don't you revamp the interface yourself. I have.

I was not talking of myself. I do not care much anymore for the visual aspect of the interface. However, for new users it could be disappointed. The interface does not look slick and does not offer interesting looking wizards that invite to click on. I think it should ! The first acquaintance with Zope should be a joy ! A new world opening up, a world where everything seems to be possible ! ;-) Maybe a bit commercial thinking, but hey, thats what made Microsoft and Oracle big. Not by delivering but simply by promising... At least Zope delivers, so what we need is showing the world it does. I also think that interfacing with stuff like Dreamweaver is very important. People use that a lot and therefore are familiar with it. Zope would then be just another back-end like Lasso (the normal Dreamweaver database connection stuff). Maybe when installing Zope, it should offer to automatically set up connections for databases ? Something like: which database do have ? Select one of more [odbc, Oracle, mySQL, etc. ]. I think this kind of end-user thinking is what Open Source really lacks compared to commercial software. Yes, I know, all this is easy to think of but it also has to be realised -( Unfortunately thats where my personal abilities are lacking... Gijs Reulen

as a newbie i am kind of glad that there are no slick interfaces. i want to learn. i dont need to be coddled. :-) is it important for zope to be "big" like MS and oracle? [lets think about that for a second; do you really want to say that zope should be like MS or MS products? yeah MS has some good points, but ...] or high-quality, open, "home-grown", *real* ...? i thought oss was supposed to be different ... ? >:-/ Regards, GEORGE DONNELLY george@cyklotron.com http://cyklotron.com/ The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. --Frank Lloyd Wright

... However, for new users it could be disappointed. The interface does not look slick and does not offer interesting looking wizards that invite to click on. I think it should ! The first acquaintance with Zope should be a joy ! A new world opening up, a world where everything seems to be possible ! ;-) Maybe a bit commercial thinking, but hey, thats what made Microsoft and Oracle big. Not by delivering but simply by promising... At least Zope delivers, so what we need is showing the world it does.

At 19:34 17/07/00 +0900, you wrote:

as a newbie i am kind of glad that there are no slick interfaces. i want to learn. i dont need to be coddled. :-)

Most of us do though ! The one thing that attracted me to Zope at the beginning was the ZSearch (using SQL Methods) Interface Wizard. Within an hour I was writing queries on my databases and doing useful stuff which I could show to people and say - look at this great Zope stuff ! I could also then look at the code and see how it worked, adapt it etc - so it was a great learning tool as well. I think being able to do some simple but useful stuff when you first install a product is really, really encouraging and really helpful. There has to be substance behind the wizards, but with Zope there is. The more Zope continues to become popular the more people who are not Python/OO gurus are going to look at it. And many of them are going to misunderstand it just like the Linuxworld article's author did. If the Zope model is to convince people of its usefulness then it has show them what it can do. Otherwise people will dismiss it as 'theory', 'for gurus only', OO-only or whatever. Wizards are one way to do this which many (not all) would enjoy using. Perhaps some us would like to think about the 'Wizards of Zope' and what we would like others to be able to achieve with Zope right out of the box. Personally I'd like to see the ZSearch Interface build 'Intelligent' forms (that is DTML methods which render the form/results/error messages depending on the values returned by previous activities. ) Regards Richard Richard Moon richard@dcs.co.uk

Graham Chiu wrote:

The author creates a straw man ( a shoe shop built upon a shoe object ) without mentioning that Zope users can use a relational database instead to build their store.

I think that's a Zope Documentation problem ;-)

And he is not aware of the way that many here use editors with FTP capabilities to interact with Zope. ( though FTP doesn't work in many situations ).

FTP support is not good enough to use for total site development. It's also not at a high enough level for content managers as I'm currently finding.

Far from being torture "Expecting someone to code in a browser text box is considered a human-rights violation in most civilized nations" the small text browser box encourages code to be factored.

Sorry, that's simply not true ;-) Text boxes are pathetic for editing. Find and replace? That said, DTML is probably more of a human rights violation right now... I think Zope Studio will address a lot of the aboev problems, but I can't help feeling a pluggin type thing for Dreamweaver would be of great benefit too :-)

From the content managers point of view I think it's all about consistency of interface and ease of use... the two reasons I still use WinNT on my desktop instead of LINUX ;-)

cheers, Chris