[Zope] ZPT tutorial

[Mark Barratt]

John Poltorak wrote:
> 
> If I spend a couple of days on something and make no progress, I'd say 
> it's 'too much work'. Wouldn't you.
> 

Yes

> I was on a course over the weekend where ordinary people in their 70's 
> with no technical ability were knocking together websites in just a few 
> hours with no prior training and no understanding of the 
> underlying concepts involved. Why should Zope be just as easy?

Because Zope is hard. You can make some great sites/applications with 
Zope but for all except the very simplest you need

. advanced understanding of html and xml
or
. a thorough grounding in programming principles
or
. a working knowledge of Python

- and preferably all three.

Most (not all) of the people who hang out here have all three of these 
skill sets, and like many skilled people, they find it hard to 
understand that the skills they have seem arcane to beginners. You 
should also understand that nobody (AFAIK) is 'them' with an interest in 
making Zope easy and helping you. You depend on the kindness of 
strangers, so politeness and gratitude pay.

In addition, Zope is heading fast into even less friendly territory. 
DTML, which is technically 'mucky' but reasonably easy to grasp for 
non-programmers, is increasingly deprecated. Through-the-web editing 
likewise. I'm not saying these trends are bad, just that they are 
happening, they make the learning curve steeper, and that they lock out 
almost all casual users unless they have the skills noted above.

The alternative in the Zope world is Plone, where you can get a site up 
and rolling in very little time (as long as you are happy for it to look 
and operate like almost every other Plone site on the planet).

or there's PHP, where the communities are probably more newbie-friendly 
and there are loads of tutorials.

or you could decide that Zope does some stuff which you must have, in 
which case David H's stereotypical response

> If you spent more time just *learning* Zope and HTML, etc and less time rationalizing your lack of progress everyone would be happy.

is appropriate.

Good luck.

-- 
Mark Barratt
Text Matters

Information design: we help explain things using
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