[Zope] <znewb010> agitprop = How to find 'find' ??? </znewb010>
Chris McDonough
chrism@digicool.com
Sat, 06 May 2000 23:51:35 -0400
Jason,
Here's what I do:
- I keep archives of the mail list in text files on my hard drive (you
can download the archived text files from
http://www.zope.org/Resources/MailingLists -- click on the [archive]
link next to each mail list).
- When I need to figure out a syntax issue I'm not sure about, I grep
this archive rather than trying to page through the DTML guide/SQL
guide/etc.
Though I've not used it there is also a PDF version of all the howtos
gathered together at
http://www.zope.org/Members/AlexR/All-Zope-Howtos.zip. Having this
document locally to search through might be easier than searching
Zope.org for the answers.
I came across the same issues when I first encountered Zope (see
http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/gainenlightenment). I'm still
frustrated a lot of times by how hard it is to find information, and I
work for the company who makes the thing.
I think there are two main factors causing our frustration:
- It's been conceded many, many times that Zope documentation is
seriously lacking. Part of documentation is presentation and
organization. Finding stuff is hard due to spotty documentation whose
holes have been (thankfully) filled in by community members in a variety
of forums -- HowTos, email posts, their own personal home pages, the ZDP
project, and most lately, an ever-growing number of Wikis. Obviously,
having so much information spread across so many different places makes
it much harder to find an answer to specific questions. Consolidating
this information is *hard*. The ZDP has been doing a pretty great job
of scoping out a presentation skeleton on their portal and taking on the
Herclean task of filling that skeleton in with useful information. Amos
and Michel have been making progress on DC's Documentation Project as
well (http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Projects/Projects). Personally,
I'm leaning towards agreeing with Maik that we should make ZDP the
primary source for Zope docs, integrating it into Zope.org somehow. But
this requires time on both sides, and both DC and the ZDP group are
lacking it. We don't want to do something that we know we can't sustain
in the long term. As broken as documentation is right now, it's highly
available and loosely maintained. It's definitely, however, not well
organized.
- Zope is huge. It's a webserver, a content management system, a search
engine, an object database, an application server, and an
object-oriented web development framework. It provides the full
services of two server-side programming languages as well as allowing
for client-side presentation through HTML, XML, CSS, WAP, etc. It
provides services over HTTP, XML-RPC, FTP, and WebDAV. It lets you
arbitrarily connect to Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Solid, ODBC, MySQL, and
Postgres databases. It has a security system that allows arbitrary
users to write code through the web. User-contributed products extend
Zope to deliver features DC never even thought about. Granted, not all
of these things are documented as well as we would like. But, even if
they were, it would *still* be hard to learn because its scope is just
so broad.
Digital Creations employs now something like... 28 people. Or something
like that. Every one of those people is a fanatic about Zope. We hear
what you're saying. Everybody from the salespeople to the COO
acknowledges that documentation and documentation organization is a
problem. We've committed resources to help alleviate the problem. But
we need help! I encourage you, if you like Zope and you can afford it,
to get involved in the ZDP.
If you *can't* afford it, and you just need to do fairly simple things
(and I hate to say this), you just *might* be better off using something
simpler like PHP or ASP or what-have-you that have much narrower scopes
and are therefore a little less time-consuming to learn the ins-and-outs
of.
Jason Cunliffe wrote:
>
> Ok its hot here in the city today ...and I am going @#$%@ nuts trying to
> find specific help on various topics in zope.
> I know the advice exists "_.{'("['some.where']")'}" in all the great
> mesasges and howtos and tips whcih have accrued over the past couple years.
>
> Q1: Why oh why oh why oh why when you go to Zope
> http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Tips does it only display
> the first 32 characters of the How-to desciption? This is not 1980!
> People have taken the trouble to write a descriptive title and you can't
> even read it in full .. what is the sense in that?
>
> Q2: Why is it not possible to see the whole thing as one scrollable list?
> Why is not possible to group these at least superficially by catgory?
>
> Q3: Why is there no infoseek-like search engine which allows an intial
> search, and then search within again to narrow things down. I find typically
> this mechanism is by far the most effective way to egt to the information
> one wants in the fastest possible time. For example search for 'External'.
> Then search within for 'python', then search agin within those results for
> 'import' etc... Why please can someone explain to me why this is so hard to
> do? I thought that infoseek's engine was written in Python or a big chunk of
> it..
>
> Q4: Why not show off Zope by having a nice Zope search interface to
> searching itself?
> The new Nip is an improvement on things but still very hard to sift through
> the results.
>
> Q5: Why for @$%@'s sake is there no organization, structure or search for
> Zope prodcuts at http://www.zope.org/Products ?
> For example 'Member Contributed Products' appear to be listed neither by
> name nor topic nor author nor date... what's with that. The zen of searching
> zope appears to be 'when you find it you will know'.. How hard is it to put
> some useful structure on this? How many newbie email posts would be saved by
> an accessible presentation? If Zope is so powerful why can't it be
> configured to show it's own stuff more clearly.
>
> Q6: Am I the only one who finds all this very strange?
>
> I love the 'idea' of zope and really want to learn to use it as a basis for
> many projects, but am finding I am being driven towards researching other
> solutions, simply because I cannot afford the time, [dealy/expense] and
> frustration of constantly seeking some valid examples quickly of the syntax.
> As an interim I turning to learn to use Python Methods and External Methods
> as a better solution, since at least that way it is easier to develop and
> read.
>
> In know Zope is free and I cannot complain.
> But imho there is a serious obstacle to its broader growth which is the
> learning curve.
> My impression is that a major obstacle to willing newbies is simply decent
> access to the archives via some smart zope-based search tools. I draw 3
> conclusions:
>
> 1. I am simply too dumb and too lazy to trawl though gadzillion threads to
> find my info
> 2. Zope has some serious problems and cannot really do what needs to be done
> in terms of dynamic search and presentation
> 3. Digital Creations are too busy/tired etc to put time in for free to get
> the web site advanced like this
> 4. No-one has really applied themselves to the problem. Those who know don't
> need it and the rest struggle along
>
> Wht do you think ?
>
> - Jason
>
> ________________________________________________________________
> Jason CUNLIFFE = NOMADICS.(Interactive Art and Technology).Design Director
>
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--
Chris McDonough
Digital Creations
Publishers of Zope - http://www.zope.org