[Grok-dev] Re: ANN: New Grok Powered Website

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

Thanks for letting us know about this website! Once every while I 
wondered how you were doing as you were rather quiet on the list, so I 
am very happy to see that the site is up and running.

Kevin Smith wrote:
[snip]
> Biggest hurdles: lack of export/import, moving large data sets,

I'd be nice if you could expand on this: what kind of import/export 
system would you need? (what would be sufficient, what would be ideal?) 
How did moving large data sets cause problems?

> lack of 
> docs/examples (at the time), 

Can still be much improved, but we've been moving forward on this indeed.

> lack of layers and viewlets,

Thank you here for the contributions! Layers have landed, and viewlets 
will do so soon enough. You should thank Tim for pushing me at the Snow 
Sprint into looking into them - I'm quite pleased with the progress we 
made there.

> Catalog scaling limitations

This is interesting to find out more about. Any ideas as to how to 
approach a solution? A common way that people have approached this 
problem is to use a relational database (or custom index software such 
as lucene) to back up the catalog index. I think it wouldn't be very 
hard to come up with a set of indexes that are RDB backed. Harder, but 
possible would be to make hurry.query aware of them so that it create 
smart SQL queries.

> lack of respect to how long it takes to build a custom CMS from ground up

:)

> zc.buildout

Already discussed elsewhere in the thread; I'm glad you are happy now we 
have our dependencies under control.

> Biggest helpers: GROK SMASH ZCML, grok.View, hurry.query, groklets, a 
> renewed respect for ZPT's especially macros, Martijn's sense of humor, 
> Philipp's book, emacs, screen, open source in general, zc.buildout

I'm glad you think I got a sense of humor. :)

[moving this bit from the bottom so I can comment on it in a better context]
 > Grok 0.9 (heavily expanded to use layers, viewlets, groklets,
 > additional
 > field indexes and add 'context' to hurry.query)

Could you elaborate on the additional field indexes you created, and you 
mean by adding context to hurry.query?

 > The site initially made heavy use of viewlets which were then
 > simplified to groklets.

It'd be valuable to see your feedback on the viewlets branch. I'd like 
to hear more about how the groklet simplification helped you. We decided 
not to do away with the viewletmanager concept yet as it could be made 
to be quite small with Grok. I noticed that your viewlets branch had 
some code that seemed to break some features of viewlets (I forget the 
details, I think possibly the ability to associate them with particular 
views, but I may be wrong).

I hope that you won't be stuck on 0.9 forever and that you will be able 
to move to Grok 1.0+ so we share a common base for these features.

> The site's not finished yet, and our business requirements are 
> constantly in flux, but thankfully due to Grok's roots in Zope3, it's 
> always being evolved to meet our needs.
> 
> THANK YOU Grok community for your hard work and know-how in creating a 
> dream web programming environment.
> 
> Go GROK!

Thank you very much for all the contributions you've already made for 
Grok, and this feedback - it's valuable feedback and also quite pleasant 
to see Grok worked out for you!

Regards,

Martijn