[ZDP] Teaching Newbies ZPT

Philipp von Weitershausen philipp@weitershausen.de
Sun, 11 May 2003 22:27:27 +0200


Hello,

I hang around #zope on IRC quite often and I have noticed a pattern 
recently:

Many newbies who are trying to do something quickly with Zope to see 
whether it fits their needs, stumble and come to the channel and ask 
questions _primarily_ about DTML! When I answer them, I always add a 
"P.S.: I recommend ZPT." - "What's ZPT?," they ask... After they would 
find it out, they're usually quite happy with it.

For some reason, people new to Zope will first try DTML and not ZPT. 
This clearly must be a documentation issue because something probably 
still points them to DTML first. As if this wasn't such a bad idea 
already, the documentation also does not tell them that there is an 
alternative to ZPT.

Unfortunately, I forgot to ask these people what kind of documentation 
they were using to learn Zope. I guess knowing that would help us 
identifying the out-of-date parts of the documentation. But even without 
that knowledge I think documentation maintainers should take extra care 
and maybe even revise documents so that newbies will be told the right 
things in the beginning.

Phil