[Zope] ZPT tutorial

[John Poltorak]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 11:04:12PM +0100, Mark Barratt wrote:
> John Poltorak wrote:
> > 
> > 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.

Whilst Zope can be used for developing extremely complex sites, that 
shouldn't preclude it as a development tool for simple sites. I think 
expertise only develops through extended usage of Zope, but there is just 
so much to learn, although I don't see a need to be an expert in numerous 
fields before touching Zope.

 
> 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.

Yes, I am aware of this. I also think that this list is not really 
appropriate for newbies, but in the absence of an alternative, this is 
where I ask my newbie questions.
 
> 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).

I looked at Plone but it is way too slow for the server I'm using. Besides 
that customisation looks like another learning cliff.
 
> or there's PHP, where the communities are probably more newbie-friendly 
> and there are loads of tutorials.

I'm sufficiently aware of Zope to know it provides a far more 
comprehensive build environment than PHP ever will and I would like to 
adopt it as my platform of choice, but it would be nice if the ZOPE 
support community was as newbie-friendly as the PHP crowd. Loads of 
tutorials and worked examples would be nice too. Reading a manual is no 
substitute for being shown how to build a web page using ZOPE and just 
reading through dozens of isolated examples of ZPT techniques makes 
progress very slow. I would much rather see a tutorial which starts of 
with a relatively complex but easily reproducible template which creates 
an interesting page, but then proceeds to de-construct what it does and 
how it does it.
 
> 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.

I only need to rationlise it when people constantly keep telling me to 
read the Zope Book as if that is the solution to everything. Fortunately 
there are a few people here who can still remember suffering the same 
plight as I am currently in an I'm grateful to them for their help.
 
> Good luck.
> 
> -- 
> Mark Barratt
> Text Matters
> 
> Information design: we help explain things using
> language | design | systems | process improvement
> ______________________________________________________
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-- 
John