[ZWeb] The new.zope.org site ----- it's great

[Jan Smith]

Hi Sidnei,

I've just been looking through the new.zope.org site.  Wow this is a great
advance over the current site.  I hadn't realised there was so much detailed
content before.

I looked through the site wearing two hats.  My first tour through the site
I asked myself what does this site tell a developer?  I see there are 18
completed projects - that's fantastic.  I've never seen this mentioned
before. There are 4 core current projects and 5 sub projects.  Hmm but then
here's another page with even more projects. There's lots more information
available on documentation I hadn't seen before. In fact there's a lot a
content here I haven't seen before. The mailing lists and active IRC
channels where you can get 24 hour help aren't prominent. I can see some
information is out of date but you have requested community help and I guess
this is on the to do list. It is now much easier to discover what zope
projects there are and how to get involved in them.  I couldn't find any
mention of the various Zope Books available apart from the excellent on-line
book - maybe they are thought of as too commercial for the site.

Looking through the site with a second hat this time as a person thinking
about alternatives to proprietary software.  It took me several clicks to
find What is Zope? under the Resources page.  Wow this page is so rich with
information for my 2 cents worth its way better than the current front page.
I would almost ditch the front page and make Resources the home page with a
little tweaking and reorganising of headings and some rewriting of the
contents.  The headings cover things of interest to first timers and
developers.  Down the track a comparison with Zope and alternatives would be
nice to see.  The most common search term on the OzZope site month after
month is PHP Nuke alternative.

This is slightly off topic but relevant to the thrust of a new Zope.org.
One of the ways to help zope grow in my opinion is to encourage non python
developers to get involved in projects as well.  I know there are zope open
source projects a designer, a tutorial writer or people with IA, UI,
JavaScript, DOM, XML, CSS or XUL skills for example can get involved in. I
am involved in some non python aspects of zope open source projects myself.
However this is not yet obvious glancing through the site.

I think Plone is a good choice for the website.  In a much more cut down way
we have just gone through a similar process of redesigning the OzZope site
for Australians and friends of zope.  Zope has a number of out of the box
choices that are great starting points but the more we thought about it, for
a user group, Plone has a lot of very nice appropriate features built in.
By making this choice it does not mean that we rejected the other Zope
solutions as being in some way inferior.  We are great fans of Silva as
well.  In fact we have recently encouraged a national not for profit
computer recycling depot providing computers with Linux operating systems to
the poor and disadvantaged to move to Plone for its community web site and
Silva for its national documentation.  A number of Zope businesses here are
fans of CMF because it is a great framework as well and suits their needs.
Horses for courses all of them from the Zope stable.

Well done on being brave enough to release the Alpha version, I know that
can be scary.  I only wish I had some time now to help out it would be great
fun.  Hopefully you have some enthusiastic volunteers.

regards

Jan V Smith
Web Administrator
http://www.ozzope.org