[Zope] At a loss

[Clayton Miller]

Hi all,
I am new to Zope and I am attempting to use both Zope and Python for the
first time. So, please excuse my ignorance.
I hope to get an E-Commerce (or should I say Z-Commerce) site up soon.

I was very interested in using the SQLSession object from the contribution
download area. After downloading and untaring into the
Zope directory (I am using RedHat so that is /usr/share/zope), all seem to
go well. However, I did not find any instructions for
getting the Zope Product to appear in my Zope Control Panel list. I
therefore assumed that I needed to compile the code using
the python compiler I had previously installed (version 1.5.2?; Zope 2.0.1
works so I assume it was 1.5.2). I looked through all of
the Zope documentation I could find but I could not find how to compile Zope
Products. I had previously installed the Postgresql
product (which I compiled using python) and it worked flawlessly. To compile
SQLSession, I used the commandline:
	python SQLSession.py
I got a compiler error stating that it could not import Persistent from
Persistence. I looked in the file /usr/share/zope/lib/python/Persistence.py
and I did not find any methods. I had setup my python environment variables
as:

	PYTHONPATH=".:/usr/share/zope/lib/python:/usr/lib/python1.5"
	PYTHONHOME="/usr/lib/python1.5"

As I also did not find any documentation on setting up python to compile
Zope objects. I just winged the above variables ;^). I have been accused
of being blind in the past so I am sure that all of the documentation that I
said I could not find exist somewhere. Anyway, I am
now under the assumption that there is more to the compilation process than
I have hacked together.

Your help would be greatly appreciated. By the way, I do plan to display the
Zope icon at the bottom of my pages. I think
Zope is a great find. I researched several commerical and non-commerical
products before deciding on Zope. I just wish a
tutorial exist that walked a newbie (like myself) through all the steps to
setup a simple site. I am still puzzled by by how to allow
users other than "superuser" to log in. I learn more by example than by
reading (as you can probably tell by my inability to
locate the documentation I need). I liked the example (I can not remember
the author or title, sorry) that went beyond Zen's
tutorial and created a Hello World! product. However, I think it would be
even better if a section was added on the compilation process
for us poor souls just starting out.

Thanks again!
Clayton.