[Zope-dev] Another open letter. :-)

[Lennart Regebro]

After the discussion here I'm slowly starting to form a picture in my mind
of how to "solve" the "problems".

First some basic facts of life:
- Zope corp needs to do what Zope corp thinks it can make money on.

- "We" (that is the Zope community) need to get some features into the base
of Zope because:
    a. It's not effective that we all solve the same problems independantly.
    b. Some features are hard to do as products.

- It is imperative that there is a single point of control for Zope, ie no
branching.


This means Zope corp needs to control what goes into Zope, but the community
needs to tell them what should go there, and the community has to help to
put it in.
To achieve this, we need better community support systems. That is, we need
a proper community site, with discussion forums, a merged collector/proposal
application with proper threaded discussions and applied workflow for
proposal states.
The projects that get started also need their protected areas on the site
with discussion forums and their own CVS trees.

In all, this would support a better inflow of comments from the community,
it would make it easier for community members to see the responses to their
input, and it would be easier to start projects with non ZC people involved
in programming.


Here are some things that I feel should be introduced into Zope:
- Workflow support. (Because everybody needs it)
- Versioning. (Because it's hard to do as a product)
- Internationalization. (Because it's hard to do as a product)
- Better user management. (Because everybody needs it)

Also, Zope would benefit from the inclusion of several products that improve
the products included in Zope. Many people have found some objects lacking
in functionality, and added that functionality and put it up on Zope.org.
Many of these improved products could easily replace the products that come
with Zope today, thereby giving a better "wow" factor to Zope without much
effort.

I also feel there are things that could be removed. And now I'm gonna say
bad things about parts of zope some people probably love, and they will hate
me for this, but I'll have to live with that. This is my view only. I have
on occasion been known to be completely wrong. :-)

- Don't do any  more work on ZClasses, and eventually drop it. To me they do
not seem easier to work with than Python, they are messier and not as
flexible.

- I feel that CMF is a failure. It doesn't do what is promised, it's very
hard to understand and many parts of it are simply designed so badly and
incorrectly that they are practically useless. Drop CMF. Take the good parts
and integrate them directly into the Zope base to make Zope a better
platform form content management applications, and forget about the rest.