[Zope-dev] Let's fix the damned website

[David Pratt]

Hi Martin. I would like to help with Zope 3 but could not commit to 
championing the effort as much as I might like to due to time 
constraints. I am prepared to write some articles, help with an 
introduction, or help review in conjunction with someone leading the 
Zope 3 effort. Are any of the lovely or zope corp folks on the z3 side 
willing to champion or participate? Is there an outline somewhere that I 
can determine something concrete to work on? Let me know. I like the 
design BTW and this is definitely a good news development.

Regards,
David

Martin Aspeli wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> The rumours are true. :) An effort has been going on for a while to 
> improve the zope.org experience and thereby help make Zope more 
> accessible to new users.
> 
> I've helped co-ordinate it, but the project has been sanctioned by the 
> Zope Foundation and driven by people like Martijn, Philipp, Wichert and 
> others. Given Martijn's excellent blog post today 
> (http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2008/04/05/0) and recent 
> progress we've made, I thought it timely to open up and ask for your help.
> 
> Here's what we have achieved so far:
> 
>  - A great design by Oliver Ruhm, paid for by Lovely Systems
>  - A Plone 3 site hosted by Lovely Systems
>  - A skin for this site by Denis Mishunoff
>  - A skeleton content structure
>  - A plan for going forward
> 
> Now we need people to help contribute content, review the content that's 
> already there and tie up a few loose ends.
> 
> You can see current state of play here: http://zode01.lovelysystems.com.
> 
> The original design mockups from Oliver are here: 
> http://woimmer.com/presenter/zope.org/1.html
> 
> We have agreed a plan going forward with the Zope Foundation. Basically, 
> we want to move the current zope.org off into a separate domain, e.g. 
> old.zope.org. We explicitly do not want to port existing content from 
> zope.org wholesale, because (a) most of it's out of date and (b) this 
> would be a huge effort. We'll need to provide some aliases for downloads 
> that people (and buildouts) expect to find on zope.org, but this can be 
> managed using Plone's RedirectionTool.
> 
> We also want to start small. Some things, like planet.zope.org, 
> wiki.zope.org and foundation.zope.org stay where they are for now. 
> Existing documentation should be ported over manually, and subject to 
> quality and relevancy review in the process.
> 
> We want to tackle the external face of Zope first. Membership of the 
> site will be by invitation (i.e. ask me and I'll give you an account), 
> for content authors only. We don't want to allow arbitrary "home 
> folders" - at least not just yet. Again, some things probably need to be 
> moved over, but there is too much cruft on the old zope.org to move it 
> wholesale.
> 
> There has been a lot of discussion around the "message" we want to send. 
> The current zope.org is quite confusing to people who are not familiar 
> with the intricate history of Zope. In short, the message we want to 
> project is:
> 
>  - Zope is an established, mature, "enterprise ready" project
> 
>  - If you don't know where to start, start with Grok (note that Grok has 
> its own website, which we link to when relevant)
> 
>  - There is a common framework that unites Zope 2, Zope 3 (the app 
> server) and Grok. We often call this "Zope 3" internally, but for the 
> purposes of explanation, we will try to refer to the core "web 
> application" libraries as the "Zope Libaries".
> 
>  - We want to frame the ZODB as something that can be used without Zope 
> as well as an integral part of Zope
> 
> To that end, the website is divided up into sections:
> 
>  - "Home" gives a quick overview and tries to get people excited
> 
>  - "Get" gives download instructions for the impatient
> 
>  - "Taste" whets the reader's appetite with some exciting code examples 
> that explain how Zope is different
> 
>  - "Projects" gives an explanation of how the different Zope projects 
> fit together (Zope 2, Zope 3, Grok, CMF, ZODB). Each is then given a 
> subfolder that contains a standard structure: A front page that explains 
> the project in more detail, "Get" (downloads), "Taste" (as above, but 
> for a particular project) and "Learn". The "Learn" section should 
> contain relevant, up-to-date documentation.
> 
>  - "Community" gives some details about how to join the Zope community
> 
>  - "Foundation" links to the Foundation site for now. If the Foundation 
> website maintainers want to move into this site in the future, they are 
> of course more than welcome to.
> 
> Now, you'll notice that a lot of content is missing! This is where we 
> need volunteers.
> 
>   o Critical reviewer -- I would like someone to review the text on
> the site from time to time and offer feedback on clarity, style,
> consistency and message. This person may either act as editor and change
> things on the fly, or just ask the relevant author to change something.
> Ideally, this is someone with an opinion on "Zope" as a whole and its
> place in the world. Jan Ulrich Hasecke has volunteered for this. I think 
> we may need two or three people for this role, though.
> 
>   o "Get" section content champion -- needs to complete this section,
> writing about grokproject, zopeproject and probably a manual/source
> install. Needs to write clear instructions that work on all target
> platforms. We can split this section into sub-pages if need be.
> 
>   o "Taste" section champion -- needs to complete this section with some
> "tasty" code examples that get people excited about Zope. They don't
> have to be 100% complete applications; rather, they should show what
> sets Zope apart. A developer should be able to read this and think "I
> could get with this". I think we can maybe adopt something from the
> Appetizers section on worldcookery.com, or invent new examples. They
> could use Grok or plain Zope 3. This probably requires something with a
> strong technical background. I'd love for this to be Philipp, since he
> always does well with this kind of thing in presentations and training,
> though I'm not sure how much time he'll have.
> 
>   o "Community" section champion -- needs to provide some details about
> the Zope mailing lists/forums and chatroom. Perhaps include etiquette as
> well. This can probably be cribbed from plone.org/support.
> 
> Then, we need a champion for each of the sub-projects. These are:
> 
>   - Zope 3 and the "Zope Libraries" -- this is the most important one in
> the short term!
> 
>   - Zope 2
> 
>   - CMF
> 
>   - ZODB
> 
> Grok has its own home page, though I think we should keep referring to
> it where it makes sense.
> 
> Please reply to this thread if you are interested in helping out! I know 
> various people have expressed an interest in the past. I hope they'll 
> reconfirm their commitment now. Hopefully, we can get the content 
> completed in a few weeks and then begin the move to making this the 
> thing that people see when they hit zope.org.
> 
> Cheers,
> Martin
>