[Zope3-dev] The vision thing

[Lennart Regebro]

On 3/5/06, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote:
> I think that one of the first steps is to agree on who our
> target audiences are and target them individually.  Zope has
> a number of target audences, including:
>
> - Non-technical users who just want to crank our a web application
>    with little muss and fuss.  This was the original focus of Zope 2
>    and now Plone.
>
> - People who know what an app server is and know they need one.
>    People who know they need to reuse applications and need tools
>    to customise them. People who know they need rich servcies, like
>    security, transactions, etc.  These are the people for whom Zope 3
>    was written.
>
> - People who want straightforward tools for developing small to moderate
>    complexity sites in Python.  I don't think we are servving this audience
>    well.
>
> Then there are more fragmented audiences, like people who want a dirt
> simple way to create applications based on relational databases.
>
> My main point is that we need to consider each of these audiences, as
> they have separate concerns.  We need to be explicit about this and
> have messages and technical solutions tailored to each audience.

Right you are. Good refocusing post. :-)

Zope3 does of course cater to audience #2 very well. Superbly even. It
does not cater to audience #1 at all, and notably,  don't think it
should. Why? Because most of them do not want a set of tools, they
want a complete CMS, or at least a framework and a large set of bits
which you can stick on easily.

The effort to cater to these people should be something written "for"
or "on" or "with" Zope3, not a part if Zope3 itself, and includes such
things as TTW development products and CMS stuff.

We are evidently not serving audience #3 well, because they are
complaining. I'm not sure what to do except make Zope3s basic bits
easier to use by themselves, which everybody agrees to.


So maybe we need THREE visions, and not one?

Vision #2 (starting with that one because it's easier): Improving
Zope3, refactoring a bit, putting ZCML on a diet and so on. All this
seems to me to be straight on track, or?

Vision #1: A CMS framework and TTW tools for Zope3.

Vision #3: Eggs for the basic technologies.


So where is Five and Zope2 in all this? Well, it continues to be an an
"upgrade/transition" path for people that are using Zope2 now, but
want to slowly move over to the #1 vision.

--
Lennart Regebro, Nuxeo     http://www.nuxeo.com/
CPS Content Management     http://www.cps-project.org/