[ZDP] Re: Stuff

[Maik.Röder]

Hi !

Rik Hoekstra schrieb:
> > > 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.

The ZDP is aiming to become the starting point for the Zope
community.

> > 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 software on the Zope.org site is not open, so the only thing we can
do is do our own thing on ZDP.

> The troubling point is, Zope still radiates a
> nerdish image and they website doesn't really open it up for interested
> non-developers.

You can become a Zope.org member, so it is open for non-developers.

> The mailing list is helpful, but it's just too much. 

I hope that we can integrate the mailing list in the ZDP site, so 
extracting, citing and giving credit is easier. 

> 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.

You can go to one of the ZDP portals for a start. There is a starting 
point for each type of user. If what you expect to be there isn't
existing, you can do something about it, because the ZDP site is 
completely open.
 
> It is surprising then that, despite the imprenatability of the
> community, there seem to be so many people using Zope anyway!

Please go to the ZDP portals and share your knowledge about Zope.
 
> The ZDP _should_ help this, but there site design is still not very
> inviting as well (sorry Maik, no offense meant).

I have taken each comment made on the design into consideration
up to now.

> 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 ;-))

There is already some work done on this, so you may want to take
this into consideration. Christian Scholz (cs@comlounge.net) has
done some graphics for the ZDP: 

http://comlounge.net/projekte/zdp/ 

Best regards,

Maik Röder