[ZDP] Mail to Amos

[Rik Hoekstra]

For the records - I sent Amos the following mail:

Amos,

You may or may not have noticed that the ZDP has switched to documentation
portals catering for specific groups of Zope users. One of these groups is
Zope Beginners, who should have their own portal. Naturally, your tutorial
should be an important part of it. We feel, however, that a complete
beginners introduction can't stand with a tutorial alone - as I'm sure
everyone will agree. More importantly, we think there should be an
integrated package with a Zope Quickstart. Some of this is already covered
in your Tutorial Notes at
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Projects/Tutorial/TutorialNotes

Below I have put together some of the remarks on the list. Most of them are
from Maik Roeder, Chris Withers and myself, so don't keep the whole ZDP
group responsible ;-)

I started with a very subtle comment on the the tutorial:

For an introduction, the tutorial (which is basically a canned hands-on
session) is not enough. Newbies also need some more theoretical (read:
higher level, conceptual) texts to get them acquainted with Zope and it's
(basic) concepts: what is dtml, what can I use it for, how? What are all
these objects I can choose from. I have a sql database, can I connect it to
Zope? How? And once it's connected?. Believe me, I have seen people struggle
with this.

Moreover, as far as I have seen it, first time users stumble blindly through
the tutorial, they do not know what is happening, have little affinity with
the subject and do not care what is happening (sorry if this sounds harsh).

Maik remarked he already tried to acoomplish this in the ZDP Portals (did
you have a look at them at the ZDP site?). For example, the beginners
portals should cater prospective users and newbies with all sorts of
backgrounds: an Administrator with some Apache background should find
exactly how he can use Zope to make it work with Apache. Now, we know (as
probably no one else knows) that much of this information is hanging out
somewhere in HowTos, guides, ZDP documents, bundled Zope documentation, but
it should be findable, hence our plea for an integration.

Chris Withers came up with the idea of a Quickstart, if only to get the
mindless clicking through the turorial out of the new users' system. People
get frustrated very quickly if they can't ACHIEVE something (see Nick
Petreley's recent article on Zope) but after they've done this they will,
quite naturally, want to get some Zen... which of course is where the theory
guide comes in... which should cover this part of Rik's comment quite
comfortably:

People learn best by getting somehing done. Let's try and give them a hand
in determining what can be done with Zope, why Zope is good for it and how
to do it. In this last part the tutorial may come in as a handy illustration
and a stepping stone for getting into Zope (and getting Zen).

MacroMedia Authorware has a usable concept in help/tutorial. They have
reusable, annotated and extensible pieces of software for key tasks and a
higher level description how to integrate them. In this way the tutorial
could be extended (which is not too far off your Tutorial Notes).

Now, what this all leads up to in terms of what is needed in the Portal:

- Quickstart: stuff already mentioned, lots of linking to the Tutorial

- Theory: the stuff Rik mentioned above (which I think is VERY important...)

- Key Tasks:

    *Create a simple homepage with Zope

    *Create a Guest book with Zope

    *Create a News Site like Slashdot with Zope

- Integration:

     *How to integrate a Database in Zope

     *How to integrate a Python Program using Zope

and possibly a host of other things.

More details of our summary can be found at:
http://www.zope.org/Members/chrisw/ZDP/NewUserPortal

This will only work if it is integrated with the tutorial. That's why this
mail - what are your thoughts, what are your comments, how can we cooperate
most usefully?

Rik Hoekstra, on behalf of the ZDP