[Zope] Re: What causes the community to stall so often?

[Mitch Pirtle]

On Fri, 2002-03-08 at 14:07, seb bacon wrote:
>
 <snipped for your pleasure>

> Have to disagree about the spam.

Hey, Fabruary has 4 messages, one about ExpoServer and another about
making money on the Internet (in Spanish), and still another trying to
sell a content management tool.  So out of 4 messages, 3 were
solicitations.  And the only Zope-related message was a request for
examples available as a tarball!

This is not a complaint.  It just looks like a dead list to me...

> Those are my guesses, anyway.  Here are my questions:
>=20
> 1) Why do so many community efforts struggle to get momentum?

Because we are all, um, er, developers.  (sheepish grin)

> 2) What is the secret to PHP's excellent documentation?

My suspicion is that their job is made easy by everything being wrapped
up in a function.  That may or may not be the way they intended it, but
just the function reference alone is all I need for a very healthy and
productive PHP life.  I can do a tremendous amount of kewl things just
knowing about those functions.

So, how to mirror that in the Zope world?  We simply cannot.  There are
a heckuva lot more than just functions here - there's objects, methods,
DTML, ZPT, CMF, and all that other stuff I haven't learned about yet.=20
I'm still hazy on DTML, and moving to ZPT/CMF because of both the 2.5
release and an inferiority complex.  So I am sure I am missing
something.

My lack of understanding of the complete Zope environment keeps me from
getting my arms around a logical documentation strategy, though.  Zope,
in one way, makes it much easier to get started (with the ZMI,
acquisition, etc.); and in another way makes it damn hard (too many of
too different things to document).

For example, you cannot just write a TAL reference.  It will have to
include significant references to ZSQL methods, which are also
intimately connected to vanilla DTML.  Ditto for those Python scripts
that send processed data for input into the database.

Is there a better way to document all these lumpy, bumpy aspects of the
Z Object Publishing Environment?

--=20

Mitch Pirtle
Corporate Security Officer
K=FChne & Nagel Management AG
Tel: +41 1 786 96 45
Fax: +41 1 786 95 95