[Grok-dev] Re: Some grok experiences

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Martin Aspeli wrote:
> I'm really excited by what's going on here - I can't imagine a better 
> team of people to make Grok rock (heh). I went through the tutorial 
> today and had a bit of a play, and just wanted to summarise a few 
> experiences. I'm sure you're aware of some of these, but it's easier for 
> me to list them as I think of them, rather than do a lot of 
> cross-checking with previous discussions... so apologies if there's noise.

Not at all. We need more people to give grok a good shake-out and find 
problems, hurdles, etc.

>  - In general, Grok should look cool out of the box; the app-install 
> front page is not exactly exciting right now. :)

We accept patches (like Martijn said) :).

>  - You can't delete grok applications from the app page, making it a bit 
> hard to undo your mistakes. Ditto for rename.

Delete is implemented now, but perhaps not uploaded. We accept patches 
for rename :).

>  - a 404 results in a page that basically has the ZMI in it, and that's 
> really confusing. I find the Zope 3 ZMI incredibly difficult to wrap my 
> head around anyway, and didn't really expect to see it here.

Fixed with the newest grokproject. Also, I hope to at least disable 
zope.app.rotterdam so that people won't be exposed to the "ZMI" at all 
with Grok. In fact I would very much like to disable the whole "/manage" 
stuff that's in Zope 3.

>  - Error messages could be more helpful. I used the tal:attributes="href 
> static/style.css" syntax, except I didn't have 'style.css' in the static 
> folder. All I got was "An internal error occurred"... the terminal 
> output was more useful, but I may not have thought to look there.

Perhaps we should enable the debug errors views by default. I think we 
should also enable developer-mode by default (which is a requirement for 
that anyway).

>  - Also, by default, zope3 with grokproject has very noisy logging with 
> parts/instance/bin/zopectl/bin fg

I don't actually care about that. One of the beefs I have with buildout 
or rather the current zope3instance recipe is that zope.conf is hacked 
together and any changes to it are lost. That makes changing things like 
developer-mode and accesslog output difficult.

>  - I think the 95% use case is that you want a common template for all 
> our pages, providing a common look and feel. I think the bootstrapped 
> grokproject should do that for you, so that all you have to do is modify 
> the template.

Possibly. This also depends on what kind of skinning technique we want 
to encourage. I would personally prefer something that's agnostic of 
Page Templates.

> It should also come with a simple stylesheet to encourage CSS-based design.

Interesting. This way we could certainly show how to do static files... 
On the other hand this might go too far as far as a stub project layout 
is concerned.

> I'd also  love some documentation/examples of megrok.five. I think the 
> only way I'll realistically get to *use* Grok for something would be if 
> I could use it for Plone development. :-)

I would like to spend some time in the future and develop a good 
Grok-for-Plone story. In particular, I see Grok as the 
Archetypes-saviour. It should allow us to componentize Archetypes in a 
way that will allow old-skool developers to continue using familiar 
concepts without having to learn about components, interfaces, ZCML, etc.


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