[Zope-PTK] Impressions of the PTK from my Christmas project

[Simon Coles]

Hi,

Over the holidays I spent a few hours messing with the PTK, with the 
intention of using it as a base for the pdworld.org site I am 
intending to create. I jotted down my impressions and sent it to some 
of the people internally to NIP, and Chris Withers suggested I 
forward it to this list to give some real world feedback from a PTK 
amateur.

For background, I'm reasonably familiar with Zope, Linux etc. I don't 
get to do real work that often, so tend to lose touch with the detail 
of things until a holiday comes up and I get a chance to get my hands 
dirty. So consider me a reasonably aware techie who hasn't spent much 
time with Zope recently. Given it was a holiday, I wasn't benefiting 
from the adult aid and assistance of my NIP colleagues either :-)

Because this is personal stuff, I'm looking for things that I can get 
done quickly before my wife gets really upset with me :-(.

pdworld.org would be a site which people could "Join" and get a 
username and password. From there could create documents in their own 
folder with information on events, resources, etc. In short, plain 
and simple PTK stuff (I hope :-).

So I need to customise the look & feel, create some new types of 
content, and generally get the thing into a state where non-techie 
people can use it (my audience will be quite new to The Internet). My 
understanding of the PTK is that it should provide a base where I can 
do this with a few hours work.

Unfortunately, from my experience it seems it is not yet something 
someone like me can just plug in, customise a bit, and get it working 
(however primitive the site may be) before my wife starts complaining.

I'm pretty sure I could create my own portal content, and I have now 
tracked down where all the look & feel is. However, its still not 
clear in my mind what happens to my customisation over upgrades. Do I 
customise DemoPortal or create my own? What's the 
advantages/disadvantages? I did read the mailing list archives but 
must confess I wasn't sure what to do here.

There are niggly little bugs in places, validation etc. isn't 
finished (confusing error messages), and as a whole the thing is 
nowhere near finished in lots of areas so I would have to spend a lot 
of time on ironing out little problems to make it usable.

It was a pain to install as well, and I had to try a number of 
versions of Zope and the PTK before I got something that worked. CVS 
checkout or a download? With or without the bits? Moving stuff 
around.... do I really need to import this? Where to? If I wasn't 
experienced with Zope I would have gone completely nuts just trying 
to install it.

My conclusion was that the PTK isn't quite there yet for the project 
I had in mind, and I should probably wait until version 1.0. It is 
however, frustratingly close in functionality to what I need. Bear in 
mind when I came to this conclusion I had a choice of doing 
pdword.org in the PTK or another project, so when it looked like the 
PTK wasn't going to fall out of bed easily I did the other project. 
The Zope-based pdnews.org will be launched in a week, so I did get to 
have some productive fun over the holidays :-)

I hope this real world feedback from a hope-to-be PTK user is 
helpful. I pass it on because I suspect my experience may be shared 
by other people who want to use the PTK for a project but can't get 
involved in the detail. If anyone wants more info about my 
experiences, please ask.

I'll give the PTK another go in a month or so's time.....



Simon
-- 
--------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ----------
Simon J. Coles                                 Email: simon@nipltd.com
New Information Paradigms                  Work Phone: +44 1344 753703
http://www.nipltd.com/                     Work Fax:   +44 1344 753742
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