Hy, Niclas;
as you state in the beginning of your email, this issue
is far away from beeing a trivial thing. I agree with your
statement. Maybe the following anecdote hits the essential
point :
It was one of my professors, who told us, that university
courses are absolutely useless, because either the students
don't understand anything, or they already know everything.
When we asked him: "Why then are we here listening to you?"
he answered, "This is because you are the exceptions from
the rule, who don't know anything, but understand everything".
We considered this as a compliment... ;-)
coming back to cocoon:
With the ongoing effort in
http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=CocoonCompetenceCenter
some of us try to get people start more quickly giving them
heavy guidance in the sense of "you don't need to understand
this now, just take it and play with it. But you MUST come
back later, if you want to understand in depth. And then you
are on your own ..." and with the cocoon-users list of course ;-)
In this sense i simply want to point people to the essentials,
giving them some KISS cookbook guidance, some first
sense of achievement and then give them the freedom to dive
as deep into the game as they want. And only then we point
them to "expanding your knowledge pages", such like
http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=CreateMinimalWebapp
which is a significant source of knowledge and getting through
it will certainly help understanding cocoon in more depths.
I want to keep the beginners away from CreateMinimalWebapp,
because stripping down cocoon to its essentials is a technical
process, but users tend to start with "application use cases"
Please i'm not talking about ALL users, i'm talking about the
exceptional users, who don't know anything about cocoon ...
regards, Hussayn
Niclas Hedhman wrote:
On Monday 03 February 2003 23:50, SAXESS - Hussayn Dabbous wrote:
I would like to distinguish between
"creating a webapp with minimal cocoon"
and
"creating a webapp with minimal functionality"
http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=CreateMinimalWebapp
would not be what a beginner wants to start with, before they
get something to see. In my eyes this may be "step 2". But to
be honest here, i never thought of stripping down cocoon
to its basics. i just keep it as is and use what i need.
One day i may find out, that a very particular peace of cocoon
would be exactly what i need, but unfortunately i dropped it
by stripping down cocoon earlier. Now i can try to find out,
what i have to put back into my webapp to get the new stuff
up and running hmm... not convinced.
I tend to both agree and disagree at the same time... ;o)
Thinking back to Apache Webserver... When I first opened the httpd.conf (which
in those days was spread out over three files to make matters worse), I was
overwhelmed with the sheer amount of settings, and closed it (them) quickly.
I realized I needed to dig through that to get my server up and running (the
defaults were also less perfect than today), and every line was scrutinized;
"Do I need to change this?", "What does this mean?" and a lot "Wow, can I do
that?"
So, although it scared the "mud-like-substance" out of me, it also re-inforced
the learning speed.
Looking at that (because I was too involved with the inception of sitemaps,
generators, aggregation and all the rest, so I know what it means in Cocoon,
and is not a "neutral" first user) I think I can give this feedback;
Any configuration file, be it httpd.conf or sitemaps, should be organized in a
couple of sections, and ordered in some kind of priority order, where lesser
used features, or very advanced features are placed far from the top.
If the first "section" covers the "essentials", and clearly indicates that "If
you are setting up Cocoon the first time, you probably don't need to go
beyond this point..." it would be great.
What I am trying to say; Complex new settings environments (such as sitemaps)
are intimidating at first (especially if your editor is not XML aware with
syntax highlighting), but it is easier to review and modify sample entries,
than trying to pick them up from a xdoc and "get it to work".
Also, the comments should be more descriptive, especially what the Cocoon
specific terms means, so if I am reasonably bright, I don't need much more
documentation.
Niclas
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