[ZPT] Plone conference talk - ideas please!

[Mitch Pirtle]

On Tue, 2003-08-26 at 11:35, Chris Withers wrote:
> Mitch Pirtle wrote:
> 
> > <the most complete, concise, detailed explanation of anything I have
> > ever read about ZPT snipped>
> 
> Out of interest, what bits of ZPT aren't clear, concise and complete?

Uh-oh, looks like I might have started something...   :^)  First of,
understand that this is IMHO, and I try not to speak for everyone...

If you understand the python-ish, object-ish nature of Zope and ZPT,
then the documentation is completely clear.  But to folks coming over
from other environments it may not be so.

Take my database grokking as an example - I was expecting something
specific for iterating through database query results...  I had no idea
that you could just loop over the results like everything else.  And now
that I understand, I am a tad bit embarrassed for not thinking of it on
my own!

Had this excellent snippet of information been provided in the ZPT docs,
I could have helped myself; but the existing docs are too general for me
to grasp.  I needed an example with a database, and couldn't find one. 
And now that I have that information and crossed that bridge, I have
suddenly become quite useful around here.

Another good example is looping and mixing the results with html tables:

  <td tal:content="bodypart/spleen">spleen</td>

What if I want that content to be bold?  I could spend(LOSE) quite a bit
of time trying to figure out how to force <strong> within that <td>, and
never get anywhere because that obviously doesn't work.  It was only due
to experimentation that I decided upon:

  <td><strong><span tal:content="bodypart/spleen" /></strong></td>

I'm working with a company that is using Plone for all of their sites,
and they selected Zope & Plone because they wanted non-techies to update
content without training or a huge learning curve.  These folks are not
unique; and there's tons of businesses looking at Zope & Plone as a
CMS-for-non-techies.  The technical people that they do have are often
part-time, special purpose people who come in to troubleshoot or do some
web programming, most likely in PHP or ASP.  Or perhaps they are
sysadmins and desktop support people pressed into service as
pinch-hitters.

We should make sure that the documentation provided has examples for
people that are not steeped in c, python, java, or other OOP ways of
life.  Many of these people are coming over from PHP- and ASP-like
worlds, where although you can use OO abstraction, most ordinary folk
use a specific function to do a specific task.  These tasks are not
mentioned in a lot of the ZPT docs, and should have examples provided to
get them going over that bridge.

"Mighty Grasshopper, you have grasped the stone."