[Zope] ZPT file reader (Zope Docs discussion)

[Paul Howell]

Agreed we need more/better documentation.  Am very glad the effort is being 
put forth to do as much on the volunteer basis as is being done, and that 
the Zope Book continues to be made online available (yay).  That said...

<2p>The approach taken by JBoss.org has certainly paid dividends for 
them.  Their emphasis from near the beginning has been to focus 
on  developing and selling high quality documentation and lots of training 
courses, which helps build a well-developed workforce around the 
product.  It also (of course) sets them up as the obvious leaders when it 
comes to developing enterprise-quality projects using JBoss.

I know next to nothing about Zope corp itself, other than that their 
corporate goal seems to be to offer top quality consulting services around 
their software.  That's the same as JBossgroup, but the JBoss approach to 
doing so (by advancing the quality of all JBoss developers through better 
education) also has helped propel enormous growth in popularity of that 
product -- which, of course, leads to more and better jobs for JBossgroup 
because JBoss gets increasingly high visibility.  So...
Zope - great product, tricky to understand, growth good but slow
JBoss - nearly great product, great docs and corporate training, growth 
seems to be through the roof.

I think Zope Corp. could likely benefit a great deal by sponsoring/leading 
the way toward *First Class* documentation for us all.  I'm not knocking ZC 
or their approach -- they do a lot for the Zopistas -- but at a minimum 
such an effort would pay for itself for ZC (write once, sell many docs, 
rewrite often, sell subscriptions), and it would increase the trickle of 
newbies into the fold, and make MUCH more palatable the adoption of Zope 
the platform into enterprises of all types.
</2p>

=P
***  DTML is dead!  Long live DTML!  ***


At 12:28 PM 11/11/2003, Dylan Reinhardt wrote:
>On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 07:40, Andreas Jung wrote:
> > > The Zope API Reference, useful as it is, is far from complete.
> > > For example, it does not answer the O.P.'s question.
> >
> > This raises my old question: why aren't there people in the community
> > willing to contribute to the documentation?
>
>Our documentation is approached in such a way that participation is
>heavily fragmented and rendered considerably less useful.  Zope's single
>biggest documentation problem is that there is far too much of it that
>is obsolete and/or non-authoritative.  Recruiting new contributors is,
>at best, a secondary problem.
>
>IMO, Zope is burdened by some early choices that were made about how
>documentation should work.  We have put a lot of though into the
>*technical* questions of *how* to host documentation but little apparent
>thought into what makes documentation useful or not.
>
>I'm working on a side project that I think may provide some of the
>usefulness questions.  At the moment, there's nothing to show, but I
>expect to put something up in mid-January.  If someone else gets around
>to solving these problems before then, great.  Otherwise, we'll see if
>what I'm cooking up helps out at all.
>
>Dylan