[Zope-dev] Re: The bleak Future of Zope?!

[Alex V. Koval]

Hi,

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:04:34 +0200, Maik Jablonski  
<maik.jablonski at uni-bielefeld.de> wrote:

> Zope2 isn't  maintained very well anymore due to limited ressources(bug  
> fixes, documentation, see mail from Andreas), but Zope3 isn'tproduction  
> ready at all. So if you talk to people making the decisionsin the  
> IT-business they say: "Zope2 seems to be a dead horse, Zope3is just a  
> child which learns to run...

Agree. Here is my point of view, as 'site manager'. We are creating
small sites for end-users, and we try to use Zope in many cases,  
recommending
this platform to end users.

Many customers refuse to use Zope because of one simple reason: they look  
at
http://www.zope.org web site, and then get back to us asking us how we
could recommend this product. In my opinion the most important fixes to
web site are:

  - Web site (zope.org) is very slow, and contains outdated documentation,
    links. Not well organized. Does not look professional way.I have no idea
    why zope.org site is slow and dying, but if it is because
    hardware or any kind of misconfiguration problem it must be fixed  
a.s.a.p.
    Just tried to open home page of http://www.zope.org - my Opera shows 1  
min 11 sec
    to load. (compare, www.php.org loads in 5 seconds). This makes our  
customers
    to make false decision that Zope is a way too slow. Most of customers
    refused to work with Zope because they tell: "all sites we looked at  
seems
    to be really slow".

  - Look at "Zope powered  
sites":http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZopePowered/. At first
    4 sites are not enought to convience any commercial customer. Even total
    of 11 links found on the page is not enought. I suggest to have "submit  
a site"
    form on this page so end users will submit their sites URLs and the  
list will be
    growing. Inactive sites should be removed after some time.

  - I do not understand the link to "Zope CMF" which leads me to  
http://cmf.zope.org/
    and where I read "ATTENTION! ... Please don't add new content here...".  
What this
    site is about, if it should not be used. Is Zope CMF dead? I see it is  
not, but
    this link makes me confused.

  - "Zope HowTos" contain all documents made in 1999. Most of people  
(including me)
     will never read such old documents because most probably many things  
described
     there are outdated.

  - "Zope Development Guide" full of comments since 2002. This should be  
refactored
    once a month, at least once a 3 months (I've seen the effort to rewrite  
ZDG
    has been started).

  - Bug tracking system (issue tracker) is not very comfortable to use.  
Better to use
    bugzilla, foxbugs, even 'trac' project will be a way much better and  
easier
    to use. And intruducing a better bug tracking could lead to better and  
faster
    bug resolution.

So, I think zope.org needs good refactoring, but it seems there are no  
single
person working on the site constantly, only from time to time (like plone  
integration event). Does anyone have any suggestions how this could be  
fixed?

I can try to help, but as you have probably noticed I am not native  
English speaker, so my help with editing texts will not be very useful.  
But we can
try to find out the problem with hardware/software setup of zope.org to  
find
out why its slow. Possible we can install bugzilla or some other thing.

I just need to know if anybody else interested into better look of zope.org
site? And how this could be done...

--
Alex V. Koval