[ZDP] Re: Stuff

[Rik Hoekstra]

[Chris,

I took the freedom to send this to the zdp list as well. You don't mind,
do you]

<snip>
> 
> > more or less new to Zope. This leads me to conclude there are many
> > people running Zope who are not in the community in any way.
> 
> A colleague of mine raised an interesting point: To many people, the
> Zope community is actually very inpenetrable as you don't know who to
> trust or believe and, of course, it's very unclear as to where you
> shoudl get docs and other information from. Maybe we should suggest this
> problem to Ethan when he returns?

Hm, never thought about this that way, but it's probably true. While
Ethan does a good job, I think this is (still) partly  a result of the
unhelpful Zope site. The troubling point is, Zope still radiates a
nerdish image and they website doesn't really open it up for interested
non-developers. The mailing list is helpful, but it's just too much. And
starting using Zope is still too difficult (as has been repeated for a
thousand times). This taken together, ZOpe has no real starting point.
This _will_ put off many people.

It is surprising then that, despite the imprenatability of the
community, there seem to be so many people using Zope anyway! 

The ZDP _should_ help this, but there site design is still not very
inviting as well (sorry Maik, no offense meant). I did some mockups for
an improved site. Don't have them here, I'll finish it tonight and then
post something. (But please, bear with me I'no graphic artist either
;-))

so much for now
Rik