Fwd: Re: [Zope] beginner

[Gernot Hillier]

Hi!

Sorry - I just noticed that I've sent this mail to Chris directly instead of 
adressing it to the list... Here we go again...

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
Subject: Re: [Zope] beginner
Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 11:08:11 +0200
From: Gernot Hillier <gernot@hillier.de>
To: "Chris McDonough" <chrism@digicool.com>


Hi!

> What, specifically, about
> the documentation is poor?  How can we improve it?

I'm a Zope newbie, too, and I had similar problems with the documentation.

So may I make some suggestions for the improvement of your help system:

- It would be great to group the HowTos in an intuitive way. It's not very
nice to go to "New-User-HowTos" and have to search through 121 documents
which are not related to each other.

- It would be a great relief if you could search through a special category
only, for example I want to search only the SiteDeveloper-HowTo's for some
keywords - if there is already some feature like this available - I wasn't
able to find it, sorry :-((

- It would be very helpful to make the output of the search function more
informative. For example, I searched some information about using XML in
Zope. What's the way to go? If I search for "XML" I get 457 items and can
only see some names which don't tell me something meaningful. How about using
some kind of summary for each HowTo? Again, here it would be very helpful to
be able to search through some special categories only...

I think the problem isn't the lack of documentation for Zope, but the lack of
good ways to find it.

But this should not mean you do bad work - I'm very excited about the really
interesting features Zope offers me and the Zope Book is really very nice!!

It's very hard to understand most of the Zope internals for me - in spite of
me being well used to object oriented programming.

And it's IMHO not possible to do more than the most simple things without a
understanding how Zope works - for example I had big problems in creating the
most simple pyhton scripts because I can't use my standard_html_header in
them, I had some expressions working inline a dtml-var but not in a python
script, and so on... All pyhton expressions I used to write were subject to a
extensive try and error testing...
Unfortunately I had no time to read the ZDB yet, perhaps it will help me to
understand more...

But I'm sure all these things will get better and Zope will be a real
alternative to Apache & Co. sooner or later ;-))

--
Bye,

Gernot