[Zope-CMF] anyone interested in developing CMF "Book"...

[Kari-Hans Kommonen]

If you come up with some useful way of collecting examples of 
stereotypical hard problems for newbies (that the book then should be 
able to answer), I'd be happy to submit a few....


I think that the most needy and potential CMF newbie is something 
like a manager-developer with modest Python exposure, limited time, 
but interest and ambition and nice but not-completely-trivial 
application ideas. She does not need so much documentation about how 
the CMF behaves, but instead of how to make it behave differently. 
She does not program for a living, and is not planning to make zope 
products, and is very happy if she can avoid browsing code, but she 
likes to see and use illustrative and well documented code examples. 
Maybe she has a free lance programmer that helps her, but this person 
is not a python/zope/cmf expert and it would cost her a fortune to 
pay the programmer to study all of this only in order to solve her 
fairly small problems well.


Developers Guide
----------------
- CMF concepts and building blocks and their responsibilities
- strategies for customising, design rationales
- explanation of some characteristically python/zope ways of doing 
things (as many come from other language environments with less 
on-the-fly customization and plug-in-ability etc.) (basics and 
fundamentals here, more examples in the CookBook)
- etc.


Reference
---------
- module documentation is not enough! the reader of the ref must get 
the content in a readable organization; now browsing the code is a 
'lost in hyperspace' problem.
- for every abstract description a concrete example of the thing in use
- links to cookbook, showing off diverse uses of the features


CookBook
--------
- real life, not too watered down examples, rationales and techniques 
well explained (in fact, good howtos - but organized into an evolving 
whole)
- the problems would also help to determine how the reference should 
be written, and the cookbook should link to the reference whenever 
the feature explained is really generic (so that all the generic 
stuff does not get hidden inside the cookbook (which may be easier to 
write content for))
- maybe this is the hottest area, where the community could best get 
together. Many can contribute good questions/problems, and all can 
try to give a good solution, while some can judge what are the best 
ways.

The main difference between this cookbook process and the existing 
howtos and the mailing list would be to try to converge on a useful 
set of non-trivial, real problems that can be well explained and 
dissected. For those who need help, it aids in navigating the problem 
space, and for those who write howtos, it helps in focusing their 
explanation efforts.

The existing mailing list and the howto's are  of course the gold 
mine for identifying important cookbook topics...


Index
-----
- the most important thing at the moment. it is too hard to find 
things with google or zope search. just having a good index to the 
existing material would take us a long way from today...


kari-hans


At 13:07 -0500 24.2.2003, george donnelly wrote:
>I'd be interested in hearing anyone's suggesstions as to what direction this
>project should go in as well. :)
>