Philip wrote:

On the download page it would be nice to have an explination of what the software is for. Ditto for contributed software.

Funny you should mention that. Two hours I scheduled a chat with Ken to talk about restructuring the package information on zope.org. Good timing! If any of you have ideas on how you'd like it to be, whip up some HTML and send it to me.

For example, how do I find out what confera will do without installing it and spending a week playing with it? That is what I did with Zope. It is not the best way to sell software, even free stuff!

Funny thing is that I don't think you can actuall find Confera on the site right now if you don't know the URL. But you're right, everything should have a Summary. Ahh, but then we slip instantly into a metadata discussion: "Is it Summary or Description? We ought to use a standard set of metadata, like [RPM, IAFA, Trove, Dublin Core, ...]" For once I'd like an answer without ten questions attached :^)

Maybe there could be a second link to a document explaining what the component does. (It could be writen by the contributer of the software, so it wouldn't be much work for the zope.org webmaster.) That would be especially great in the contributed software. What are XMLConfig, MySQL Input Wizard, slashdot.py anyways! They sound interesting but I am still learning 10 other things, I need to know what they do first!

Yup.

This is the INFORMATION AGE, afterall!

Oh, that's what you call the stuff I'm drowning in? :^) --Paul