[Zope3-dev] Re: z3c.widget(.tiny) widget available to easy_install anywhere?

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

David Pratt wrote:
> Hi Martin. Cheeseshop does this already. You can see how a nice overview 
> page is constructed by putting readme.txt with readme.txt release notes 
> in setup.py as restructured text. This is available on some zope 
> packages but also the zif packages on pipy.

Yes, I know that's possible and I certainly in general would encourage 
publication of zope related packages on the cheeseshop.

Besides the technical reasons why we may not want to rely on *only* the 
cheeseshop for this kind of stuff, as discussed by Fred and Jim, I think 
there are also developer marketing reasons why we want a presence of 
Zope 3 related packages somewhere on zope.org.

We want to show that Zope 3 is the most extensible Python web framework 
in the world. We want to show that Zope 3 has the widest range and most 
powerful set of extensions available. We want to guide new developers in 
the right direction: we want them to reuse our wide range of components. 
We want to help existing developers find all the great Zope 3 related 
packages out there. Using the buildout/setuptools infrastructure, we 
want to make it trivially easy for people to start using these packages 
in their projects.

Currently this is all not so easy. I want to use z3c.widget, but it 
didn't appear to be available somewhere. I want to go to the Zope 3 
extension overview page on Zope 3, look through it, search through it, 
click on a package, and read about it. I want a clear indication on how 
I start using it in my own project.

You're right of course that the cheeseshop provides some of this. We may 
be able to reuse some of its infrastructure; I certainly hope so. 
Whatever we do, we need to have great cheeseshop entries too. But I 
think we need to be able to point people to a page on zope.org in the 
zope.org layout that we can point people to, and say "look here! isn't 
zope awesome?". We want them to drool when they see all the building 
blocks that Zope has for them.

> Actually, I thought the way this was all going to unfold 
> was with the ZF website which I think is still being worked on. Many 
> thanks.

The term "ZF website" is a bit confusing.

To clarify from the foundation perspective, we are working on a number 
of websites under the Zope Foundation. "We" here is the zope community - 
the Zope Foundation cannot do much without the community volunteers. The 
foundation can only help guide things along.

The foundation has a website particular to itself, foundation.zope.org. 
The foundation is also helping with various other websites, in 
particular wiki.zope.org. We hope to expand this further, but again, we 
rely on volunteers from the community.

Then there is also the apparently moribund zf.zscp project, which is, 
despite its name, a community project and wasn't a direct foundation 
initiative. I'm saying this for completeness - it doesn't matter much in 
practicem whose initiative it is. Its last checkins were 9 months ago, 
and those were only to fix up some incompatibilities with newer Zope 3 
releases, if I read the checkin comment correctly. I think we might be 
better off with less ambitious approach to set up an initial packages 
overview, but quality indicators and so on would certainly be quite helpful.

Regards,

Martijn