[ZPT] Web Design with ZPT

[Joel Burton]

On Sat, 2 Mar 2002, Joseph Griffin wrote:

> Joel, thanks for your response. Let me phrase my question differently. Deep
> inside the bowels of Zope dot com there are a group of developers that
> decided what features Zope should have based on how they wanted to use the
> software in their consulting services (which pays their bills). I suspect in
> order to keep their labor costs down, they have adopted a strict regime for
> designing, contructing, and maintaining websites for their customers. I have
> read (and in some cases studied) a lot of the Zope book's contents. The book
> explains what the features are and how to use them in simple examples, but I
> have yet to find text that explains how to build a dynamic *and* low
> maintance web site. It may not be in Zope dot com's best interest because it
> could cut into the need for consulting services. What do you think? Joseph

I've met many of the principals on ZC in social or work settings, but I
obviously can't speak for ZC. But I can speak about what I think...

Clearly, ZC wants to stay in business and make money doing it. So, in some
way, they'd love to get as consulting clients every profitable job they
could handle. But, realistically, they're not the right scale or fit for
some work, and probably coudln't scale overnight to handling every piece
of Zope consulting work. So, realistically, they know there will be other
players. (For instance, most of my work is with progressive nonprofit
corporations, which sometimes is a task of love not profit. It can be
difficult to make traditional profit margins working with some of the
groups that I love to call clients, but, hey, I'm a leftist masochist ;-)
)

So, ZC faces the question: knowing that they can't get/don't want all the
Zope consulting, should they help other consulting firms/designers? I
think the answer is *yes* and I think they realize that as well. The more
good Zope people there are out there, the more good Zope sites and
knowledge there are out there, the more Zope's stock rises, and therefore,
the more ZC's stock rises (Note for instance how they moved from Digicool
to ZopeCorp--completely trying ot tie their identity in with the growing
strength of Zope).

To this end, they've helped their staff write good documentation (the Zope
Book), they've sent their staff to user group meetings (Paul, Jim,
Andreas, and Chris W have all presented at the DC User Group meeting,
for instance.)

Does Zope have great documentation? Not as good as some. Some areas are
especially rough (CMF, for instance, is very early in the documentation
process), some are quite good.

Zope.org is a fantastic site, considering it doesn't bring profit directly
to ZC. Sure, I'd focus on make improvements to it (A librarian to help
rescue from mediocrity the nuggets of good stuff in the HOWTOs and Tips
would be great, as would clean up of the contributed Products), but this
is material the community could help on. ZC hasn't always been as "open
source feeling" as some companies (no direct CVS write access to
outsiders, etc.), but this has been changing in a positive direction,
IMHO.

Whew. But to your question "are there good examples of complete Zope
sites, rather than simple examples?" Some. The source for ZopeLabs and
ZopeZen are both available, and they're great sites. Sourece for every
page is zope.org is available with the link at the bottom.

A few months ago, I offered to open up a real-world site I designed so
that others could see how I structured it, integrated RDMS, etc. I said
that, before I could do this, it needed a security audit to make sure that
I wasn't going to open up my client to outsiders having inside information
on their security flaws. Unfortunately, no one offered to be an set of
outside eyes for this, and the idea was dropped by me. If experienced Zope
developers can help with this, I'd be happy to clone the site onto my
personal server and grant anonymous viewers read-only access to management
screens, etc. (or just make the whole thing a .zexp)

Dieter Maurer has also been writing a book that will walk through the
creation of a real site. It looks as if the work on the book has stalled,
but a public kind word to Dieter about this can't hurt. ;-)

In short: no, there aren't perfect resources about the real-world zope
site structuring decisions. But rather than blame ZC in any way, I think
they've been incredible partners to our community. I think it makes more
sense to thank ZC, then figure out ways that we can provide this help to
each other.

[apologies for zillion typos. i'm visiting my parents today, and they have
a 28.8 connection. Eep!]

-- 

Joel BURTON  |  joel@joelburton.com  |  joelburton.com  |  aim: wjoelburton
Independent Knowledge Management Consultant