[Zope] The Wizards of Zope (was Linuxworld Article)

[Richard Moon]

At 19:34 17/07/00 +0900, you wrote:
>as a newbie i am kind of glad that there are no slick interfaces. i want to
>learn. i dont need to be coddled. :-)

Most of us do though !

The one thing that attracted me to Zope at the beginning was the ZSearch 
(using SQL Methods) Interface Wizard. Within an hour I was writing queries 
on my databases and doing useful stuff which I could show to people and say 
- look at this great Zope stuff !

I could also then look at the code and see how it worked, adapt it etc - so 
it was a great learning tool as well.

I think being able to do some simple but useful stuff when you first 
install a product is really, really encouraging and really helpful. There 
has to be substance behind the wizards, but with Zope there is.

The more Zope continues to become popular the more people who are not 
Python/OO gurus are going to look at it. And many of them are going to 
misunderstand it just like the Linuxworld article's author did.

If the Zope model is to convince people of its usefulness then it has show 
them what it can do. Otherwise people will dismiss it as 'theory', 'for 
gurus only', OO-only or whatever. Wizards are one way to do this which many 
(not all) would enjoy using.

Perhaps some us would like to think about the 'Wizards of Zope' and what we 
would like others to be able to achieve with Zope right out of the box.

Personally I'd like to see the ZSearch Interface build 'Intelligent' forms 
(that is DTML methods which render the form/results/error messages 
depending on the values returned by previous activities. )


Regards


Richard


Richard Moon
richard@dcs.co.uk