Hi Peter, hi * ! Am Montag, 2. Juli 2001 14:54 schrieben Sie:

Responsible; please don't say that you can do this and that with the advanced search. People don't want to do advanced searches since google was invented. No matter how smart and educated Zope software engineers and web programmers are, they are still very lazy and wants to be treated like babies.

Here I don't agree. It would be OK for me to use the advanced search if I only want to find documents in a special area, for example in the "Site Developer-HowTos". But this isn't possible with the advanced search either - or I was to silly to find it... -- Bye, Gernot

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Well, that's not what Zope is trying to be, although, if it was, it's already there... but I think we appreciate the sentiment. ;-)

Hmm. For me personally, Zope is a replacement for Apache + Perl - did I make a mistake? ;-))

No.. of course not. Sorry. Most of the "documentation problem" is actually a preception problem and an organization problem. Folks (like yourself) perceive Zope to be "just 'this'", where 'this' is a very specific thing. In your case, it's a replacement for Apache and perl. You likely expect to see things in the docs about how to run a CGI script, how to untaint form variables, and maybe how to hook Zope up to MySQL. However, you need to do none of these things to use Zope. Zope doesn't serve CGI, you don't need to untaint formvars, and you don't need to use a relational database to make a dynamic website using Zope. Zope's got its own webserver, its got its own object database. Compound this problem with sets of folks coming to Zope from Vignette StoryServer, from Mason, from OpenACS, and from a J2EE world. All of these folks have different expectations of what Zope really is, what it does, and how it should work. This multipurposing confuses the bejeezus out of people when they first come to Zope, because there's no way a single set of docs could possibly serve all of those audiences. We'd need to write maybe four or five different sets of documentation to service all of these audiences. We can't do this for financial reasons. But people flounder aimlessly due to the disconnect and get very upset. Zope is different than the combination of Perl and apache (or insert your favorite dynamic website software here), so much different that you need to look at the problem you're attempting to solve a little differently to apply Zope to it. You need to get a conceptual understanding of the object database and how methods are called on Zope objects and lots of other stuff. This is a liability sometimes when all you want to do is "get it working" and you have little Zope experience. But I don't know of a quick fix other than pointing folks at the appropriate docs when they ask. - C

One problem with adding comments to the function documentation for Zope (vs PHP) is that the function call layer (API) in Zope is incredibly ugly compared to PHP. Think manage_whatever etc. -Magnus

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This multipurposing confuses the bejeezus out of people when they first come to Zope, because there's no way a single set of docs could possibly serve all of those audiences. We'd need to write maybe four or five different sets of documentation to service all of these audiences. We can't do this for financial reasons.

What could be good however : have a "how to make the transition" guide for differents origins. Maybe ask some experienced zope users who were using different tools before the discovered zope. Having for example a simple app written in php and then with zope, idem for coldfusion and others... But imho if you take the time to read and understand the zope book you get all of this and a lot more.

Yes... unless you really want to do something very specific to a particular system... like.. use regexes in Perl. You'd need to search almost forever to figure out how to expose regex functionality in Zope without using an external method. There are lots of other examples like this. All we can do is rely on the community and the maillist here.

something different :

I had to search the php.net site for a particular function, and I found what is so cool about this site : users can search any php function very easily, and most important : *visitors can add comments and examples* to the function explanation.

This could be added to the zope docs imho. One folder per function, and let the users add their own comments (guestbook like).

How about http://serenade.4-am.com/ZopeBook? This Zope Book instance is going away, so don't get too carried away adding comments... but if you like it, *please* let the Zope docs folks know that you'd like to get the Zope Book annotation/bugtracking system out of the SourceForge tracker and into this system by emailing docs@digicool.com .

something more different :

why not add a guestbook-like system to every page of zope.org? This way we could read the experience of other users about the current page.

This is the purpose of the CMF Discussion system (an example of which the above is *not*). - C