[Zope-dev] RE: [Zope] Barriers to Zope popularity: Part 1: wysiwig
editing
Dody Gunawinata
dody_g@eles.com
Thu, 23 Sep 1999 11:50:57 +1000
I think "DOCUMENTATION" is more than anything else, the greatest barrier
to people using Zope.
Probably Zope is too powerful for its own good. You've got this tons of
features that you can exploit,
so much of good thing, but there is currently no document that actually
guides a beginner gently and hides
the more advance features from them.
For example, about storing data. In Cold Fusion/ASP/Perl, there aren't
many ways to store a data, flat file or a database. That's easy
to explain to a beginner..Do it this way, only. Limited but simple. With
Zope, you got Persistent database, SQL database, and tons of cool tricks
to do with them. I see one beginner example (can't remember the article)
where it guides the user to create a WebBoard using Python/Persistent. A
beginner would simply lost. A ZSQL method would be a lot simpler, as SQL
is easier to understand.
Much of the documentation is designed with *advance* developers in mind.
It's time for Zope for Dummies.
Dody
Phil Harris wrote:
>
> Frontpage 2000 can do webdav to a certain extent already, that's what the
> Web Folders are.
>
> Also if you search the Ms website for somthing called 'kissfp', it will give
> you a nice warm glow ;¬).
>
> It allows Frontpage 2000 to use FTP in an intelligent way to conect to Zope.
>
> HTH
>
> Phil
> phil@philh.org
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of Jay,
> Dylan
> Sent: Thursday, September 23, 1999 8:01 AM
> To: 'zope@zope.org'; 'zope-dev@zope.org'
> Subject: [Zope] Barriers to Zope popularity: Part 1: wysiwig editing
>
> Having been using Zope for the past 8months or so I see two potential
> reasons as to why more people at my work havn't taken to Zope.
>
> One discussed of late is WYSIWYG editing. I HATE wysiwyg editing. It
> invariably makes a mess. It seems that a lot of people disagree with me and
> find a system that allows wysiwyg editing to make the creation of good web
> pages simplier.
>
> Possible solution:
>
> Frontpage seems to me to be the weapon of choice for these "amateur" web
> authors. I imagine that frontpage will support webdav in the future but for
> now I think it would be possible to support a subset of the frontpage web
> extensions. At least the ones that deal with authoring etc. It all uses HTTP
> so I imagine it would be as hard to implement as webdav support was.
> Products could even be created for searching and web discussion extensions
> but I would think that this would detract from Zope and add support for
> frontpage more than the reverse.
> The next problem with this is how to edit partial pages in a wysiwyg editor.
> Ie how to edit a whole page when every DTML doc has <dtml-var
> standard_html_header> etc in. What we could do is to have a special render
> method that produces an html document which has all the html the real
> rendered page does as well as the DTML cunningly encoded in it. Then a
> special update method can take this an process the changes to the parts of
> the document as neccesary. For instance
>
> <!--#var standard_html_header-->
> <h2><!--#var title_or_id--></h2>
> <p>
> This is the <!--#var id--> Document.
> </p>
> <!--#var standard_html_footer-->
>
> could be rendered as
>
> <!--%begin-dtml-var standard_html_header-->
> <html>
> <head>
> <body>
> <!--%end-dtml-var standard_html_header-->
> <h2><!--%begin-dtml-var title_or_id-->My Documents Title<!--%end-dtml-var
> title_or_id--></h2>
> <p>
> This is the <!--%begin-dtml-var id-->myDoc<!--%end-dtml-var id--> Document.
> </p>
> <!--%begin-dtml-var standard_html_header-->
> </body>
> <!--%end-dtml-var standard_html_header-->
>
> or something similar.
>
> As long as ALL the dtml in a document can be encoded in this way and the
> visual editor leaves the comments alone then this will work.
>
> This leads to the question of how the update method will deal with updates
> to include documents/methods/properties? Not sure. It could either, give an
> exception (might be possible with WEC), just ignore them, or try and perform
> the updates on the other objects (potentially messy but possible in limited
> cases???).
>
> Thoughts?
>
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