Hi
On 2012-08-18 16:45:56 +0000, Martin Aspeli said:
On 18 August 2012 16:34, W. Anderson
<[email protected]> wrote:
It now appears, with e-mails to "Plone Setup" forum these two recent
postings - one from
someone in UK - [email protected] -
asking about Windows registry Cleaner software
and second apparently from Russian - [email protected] with a
reply offering such registry cleaner (assuredly malware), that the
forum has been hijacked
by spam bots and idiots whose intentions veer completely to the
opposite of any purpose or
interest in Plone Content Management Systems (CMS) in any form.
In hindsight the forum moderator should have instantly stopped any and
all comments
on "Best Windows version for Plone install" discussion, since that
topic is extraneous
to any help or support of Plone on the Microsoft Windows OS.
This forum/list is not moderated. At least not yet. We are trying to
catch and block the spammers, but these are all automatically generated
spam, so it's not that easy to stop.
We're on it. Please don't make the problem worse by over-reacting or
meta-posting about the spam, thereby compounding the noise.
The anti-Windows sentiment is not really appropriate on this list,
either. Plone supports deployment and development on Linux, Mac OS X
and Windows. We intend to keep it that way. Most developers and users,
anecdotally, use OS X or Linux, but frankly there is no "slant" one way
or another.
+1 If there is any such perceived slant I think it's due to the
inherent nature of the various platforms. Plone-the-project must
provide robust, easy to use installers for "all major platforms". It
just so happens that Windows is:
- Not free
- Harder to integrate
- The most widely used OS in the world(1)
Most unix installers/distributions need only to be supplied to be
useful. The latest Windows installers seem to be causing a bit more
confusion than we'd like. IIUC, there is some effort to standardize
every installer around the Unified Installer, which I think must happen
if we have any hope of unconfusing people in the future.
To give you an example of the scale of the problem, let's start with
terminology. There are certain terms used in Plone that I absolutely
hate, because I feel they confuse end users. Terms like (not all of
which I hate, but all of which I'm certain confuse people, and in no
particular order):
- Products
- instance
- zinstance
- zopepy
- Buildout
- Eggs
- GenericSetup
- Archetypes
- ZopeSkel
- Templer
- Diazo
- ZEO
- ArchGenXML
- bootstrap
- skins
- portal_*
- Zope
- Zope2
- Zope3
- Zope Component Architecture
- Zope Toolkit
- External Method
- Browser View
- Viewlet
- Portlet
- repozo
- recipes
- bluebrints
- transmogrifier
- ZODB
- Data.fs
- component
- interface
- KSS
- Acquisition
- paster
- CMF
We need to throw away or hide all this old terminolog and start over
IMHO (the terminology, not the actual technology which of course is
much harder to get rid of. And I'm not suggesting that Plone is unique
in its wealth of complex terminology used to describe the stack. Just
that we've lost our ability to provide end users with simple
terminology to get the job done. I.e. we the developers have become
uncumbered with all of this technology, and all of these terms). Here's
some simple terminology I am comfortable with:
- Python: The programming language used to build Plone, and the name of
an executable interpreter.
- Plone: The name of a popular Python-based CMS, and the name of the
program that runs the Plone CMS application (c.f. instance)
- Add-ons: Python code and other resources that add functionality to
your Plone website.
- Themes: Add-ons that chanage the appearance of your Plone website.
- Plone API: The programming interface I the programmer user to
customize Plone's default behavior, and to build applications on top of
Plone.
And here's three more terms that are fair game:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
And while we're at it, let's add a few more fairly easy ones:
- Website: Text and other resources available at a URL.
- Web application: A computer program whose user interface is a website.
- CMS: A type of web application designed to make it easy for non
technical users to edit website content.
Everything else falls into the category of "if you really want to know
more, then…". And everything from the long list should fit into one of
the terms on the shorter list.
And that's just terminology. We need to have a discussion about what to
call things first before we can fix them. Again, all of this is IMHO
obviously. I'm sure others feel differently. But I'm adamant that a
discussion must occur.
For (stupid, simple) example: Do we call add-ons "products" for the
next five years? Who decides? What documentation and software needs to
be updated? Just this simple, stupid issue could entail a massive
effort to decide on and fix (I'm actually OK with calling them
Products, but just like with anything else in Plone, we have people
calling them both and that's confusing. At this point I'd really like
to hear from someone, anyone besides me that they should be called one
or the other for the next five years and why.)[2]
Alex
(1) No idea if this is actually still true, but I suspect it is.
(2) It bears repeating, none of this is unique to Plone. Almost the
exact same thing is happening with Python and their packaging story,
with the proliferation of confusing information surrounding all of the
technologies: distutils, setuptools, distribute, distutils2,
packagings, eggs, distributions, and now the new "wheel" built-package
format.
Martin
--
Alex Clark · http://pythonpackages.com
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