[ZDP] Teaching Newbies ZPT

[Chris McDonough]

I actually am not sure that this problem can be solved in any reasonable
way.  AFAICT, people don't actually read documentation before attempt to
create a system using Zope (or any other framework).  They cut and paste
and use recipes and examples try things and fail and eventually come to
some sort of working solution, and only read the docs when they're
really stuck.

FWIW, the 2.6 edition of the Zope Book goes in to a fair amount of
detail about the difference between ZPT and DTML and where it is advised
to use one over the other.  It's very prominent in the docs, but as I
said, I'm not sure that people really read them this closely.

- C


On Sun, 2003-05-11 at 16:27, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> 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 identifying the out-of-date parts of the documentation.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
> 
> 
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