Fwd: Re: [Zope] beginner

[Chris McDonough]

> 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.

Sure... this makes sense.  I don't look much at the HowTos anymore. But
you're right.  :-(  There was some community-led work done long ago on
this.  I guess it didn't do much.
 
> - 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 :-((

No... I don't think there is.  

 > - 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...


Uh huh.

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

OK, so if I can summarize, you're asking for HowTos on Zope.org to be
organized more effectively, and you're asking for a "narrow-by-search"
feature on Zope.org.  I'm cc'ing the Zope-web maillist on this so this
can go in the feature-request pile.

> 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...

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

Well, that's not what Zope is trying to be, although, if it was, it's
already there... but I think we appreciate the sentiment. ;-)

Thanks,

-- 
Chris McDonough                         Digital Creations, Inc.
Publishers of Zope                        http://www.zope.org

""" Killing hundreds of birds with thousands of stones """