Re: [Zope-dev] Plone/Metadata/FUD

2002-10-03 Thread Paul Everitt


On Thursday, Oct 3, 2002, at 03:54 Europe/Paris, James Johnson wrote:

 I've been around the Zope/Python scene for many years.  One thing I 
 see this group suffer I believe if from the groupthink mentality.  
 Imho Alexander Limi 2 cents worth demonstrated Erik's point 
 perfectly.   applaud the effort made with plone.  I believe it to be a 
 spoon in which we can spoon feed newbies into the CMS side of the Zope 
 way.
  Seem my post regarding Zopezen.org.  Plone is slow.  Zope with CMF is 
 slow... Not as slow as plone, but the issue is with ZPT.  There is no 
 way around it Erik is right.  Developer time being spent on speeding 
 up plone in order to backport the improvements to Zope/CMF sounds... 
 Well arse backwards.  Plone has its place, but I suspect some 
 doublespeak here, lets be realistic about it.

The Plone people are a layer above CMF, which is a layer above Zope, 
which is a layer above Python, which is a layer above the C library, 
which is...

Do the Plone people have responsibility for all the layers below them?  
Nope.  If there was a bug in the Python compiler (and in the last six 
months, there was one), should Plone have to fix it?  Should they also 
fix problems in the Linux virtual memory model if they find that too?  
Nope.

   I debated a long time ago about CMS being the core of Zope anyway, 
 but lo and behold they pushed on with a CMF product.  I see plone as 
 being the same, a

Two errors here:

a. The Zope community, on the whole, doesn't want Zope narrowed 
exclusively to content management.

b. The CMF isn't a product.  It is a framework.  It specifically 
intends to not be a product.

  product. Now my understanding is that with Zope3, they will roll a 
 lot of the CMF functionality into Zope3 Hmm go figure?  All that 
 time wasted on maintaining 2

This isn't precise.  The CMF machinery, the part not unique to content 
management, is going into Zope 3.  The effort for content management in 
Zope 3 is being managed as a companion project:

   http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-dev/2002-September/002819.html

I'll note that you are neither subscribed to the Zope 3 mailing list, 
nor have you commented on the email above.  If you're not even 
participating, then you should be more circumspect when making 
assertions such as:

  products Zope/CMF has proven cumbersome at the least imho.  Now just 
 imagine if the community would have listened to the lone voice 
 James-then/Erik-now where we

...this.  How can we listen to you if you're not participating?  But to 
your point: the Zope community does not want, IMO, Zope and CMF merged. 
  Content management is a piece of the Zope pie, not the whole pie.

  would be today.  We all know that the decision back then was based on 
 commercial interest for ZC and others trying to market some industry 
 catch phrase.

I have no idea what you are claiming.  In fact, the reverse is true: ZC 
is focused on content management, but ZC realized others want to do 
different things with Zope.  Thus ZC didn't turn Zope into a 
CMS-exclusive thing.  Doing the CMF outside of Zope allowed the CMF to 
make rapid progress in a focused area without making promises that Zope 
itself would have to live with permanently.

This has worked perfectly.  We all now know a lot more about the 
patterns of content management.  We can now refine them, and refine 
Zope, with the work on Zope 3.

Tell me, do you think KDE should be merged into X11?  It is exactly the 
same analogy.

You're also claiming that Erik is voicing your opinion.  I don't 
believe Erik wants a one-size-fits-all CMS product that everyone must 
support, nor do I believe Erik wants Zope to be focused exclusively on 
content management.  However, I don't pretend to speak for Erik, so he 
can correct me if I'm wrong.

   So I hear you Erik, you have these wonderful, bright people working 
 on special interest projects, but not on the core issues that allow 
 Zope to have that strong core that it needs to move it forward.

People work on what they want to work on.  Alex Limi knows CSS and 
doesn't want to learn how the ZPT compiler should be optimized in C.  
It is unfair that you demand that he learn how to program in C.

It is also wrong.  Zope has more people that know C than know CSS well. 
  We are lucky that Alex is filling an unmet need in the world of Zope.

  With it being evident in how the Release early/Release often mantra 
 has been

Explain how this is thrown by the wayside.  You can, every single day, 
make a checkout of any part of Zope.  Sure there was a gap between 2.6 
alpha and 2.6 beta.  But that's a single datapoint.  Name another 
datapoint to support your conclusion.

  thrown to the wayside, I'm left wondering what do I do next with my 
 2.5.1 site?  Do I go the plone, 2.6, 2.7 or 3.0 route?

Going the Plone route is orthogonal to choosing a Zope version.

Not a single person in the world of Zope claims that 3.0 could even run 
a prototype system, much less 

Re: [Zope-dev] Plone/Metadata/FUD

2002-10-03 Thread Max M

Paul Everitt wrote:
 
 ...this.  How can we listen to you if you're not participating?  But to 
 your point: the Zope community does not want, IMO, Zope and CMF merged. 
  Content management is a piece of the Zope pie, not the whole pie.


And sooo right you are. If Zope became the CMF or Plone I would drop it 
in an instance.

There are so many wonderfull things that can be done in Zope, when it is 
as it is now. And many of the things does not fit into the cmf frame of 
mind.

Ie. I have a completely different idea as to how things should be done 
in Zope than how the CMF do it.

When you start making a concrete implementation of something you make 
some decissions in the beginning, and those decissions influence how you 
make the rest of your decissions.

So you get this complex web of layers of decissions that depends on each 
other.

You sort of paint yourself into a corner. An evolutionary dead-end so to 
speak.

If Zope gets forced to go in one different direction, like CMF, it will 
quickly hit an evolutionary dead end.



regards Max M


-- 

The reason I don't reach any higher is that I stand on the shoulders of 
midgets.


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Re: [Zope-dev] Plone/Metadata/FUD

2002-10-03 Thread James Johnson




From: Max M [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Paul Everitt wrote:

...this.  How can we listen to you if you're not participating?  But to 
your point: the Zope community does not want, IMO, Zope and CMF merged.  
Content management is a piece of the Zope pie, not the whole pie.


And sooo right you are. If Zope became the CMF or Plone I would drop it in 
an instance.

  I'm way too tired and need to hit the sack now, but here is a quote from 
the URL given to me by Paul  Zope 3 will include many of the components and 
frameworks currently supplied by the CMF.   Now I never claimed or stated 
that the CMF needed to be merged with the Core Zope. Nor did I claim that 
Plone needed to be merged into Zope.

  After school tommorrow I will work to clarify my position.  What I'm 
sensing though is double speak, because now it sounds like you want to beef 
up that shovel, and imho the content to be managed is the dirt.

  My only response is why wasn't  Many of the components and frameworks 
currently supplied by the CMF included in the core Zope in the first place? 
  Everybody has the right to work on their own thing sure.  We would already 
have a highly extensible Zope3 by now if the time wasn't spent trying to 
create something else that should have been in the core of Zope in the first 
place.  Let me ask you this, what does an app server serve?  I say it 
servers content, you can call it data, information, results, or whatever.  
I'd say we would have had alot more products out for Zope had that framework 
been placed in Zope instead or Forking the content concept with a seperate 
tool.  There are parts of the CMF that we can agree on that don't belong in 
the core of Zope.  And that is where products such as Plone, CMFZen, and 
Swishdot come into play.  What is the problem with my point of view?



snip


Peace,
-- James
I am a Washington State Citizen.
Spamming this Email Address may be against Washington State Law
Chapter 19.86, and 19.190 RCW. http://www.wa.gov/ago/junkemail/protect.html


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Re: [Zope-dev] Plone/Metadata/FUD

2002-10-03 Thread Steve Alexander


  My only response is why wasn't  Many of the components and frameworks 
 currently supplied by the CMF included in the core Zope in the first 
 place?  Everybody has the right to work on their own thing sure.  We 
 would already have a highly extensible Zope3 by now if the time wasn't 
 spent trying to create something else that should have been in the core 
 of Zope in the first place.

If only people could write the ideal software first time!

 From my point of view as a Zope 3 contributor, I'm extremely glad that 
the patterns, use-cases and learning experiences were developed in the 
CMF, outside of the core of Zope.

If what is going into Zope 3 had been worked into the core of Zope 2 
instead of being tried out in the CMF, the speed of development would 
have been an order of magnitude slower, and there would have been a much 
greater risk of increasing the number of deprecated APIs in the Zope 2 core.

So, bravo to the CMF developers and contributors. Not only do we have a 
useful and innovative framework today, we have the blueprints for a 
better Zope tomorrow.

--
Steve Alexander


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Re: [Zope-dev] Plone/Metadata/FUD

2002-10-03 Thread Joachim Werner

Hi!

I could comment for hours on the postings in this thread (after rereading
what I've just written below I actually did ;-)). But let me just take this
to say what is most important to me:

 In the world of Zope 3, this distinction will be even more clear.  Zope
 2 unfortunately tried too much to be an enduser product, causing
 confusion.  Zope 3 will clearly say: This is for developers.

Paul, you are talking about a point that is very critical to Zope's future.
Many of us started using Zope in the first place because it was a cool,
out-of-the box product. Zope 1.x, as well as the early versions of Zope 2.x,
could be described as a feature-complete, easy-to-customize content
mangement system for a small number of users, with support for integration
of data from SQL and other external sources and for writing nice little
dynamic apps. You just needed some DTML, not really do any real programming,
be it in Python or DTML. And the separation of programming vs. just
customizing was rather obvious. With the limited possibilities of DTML it
was impossible to do real coding, which was a good thing.

The Zope Management Interface (ZMI) worked fine if you had just a few
templates, like a customized index_html, standard_html_header, etc. The
Add-list was short, and even security worked fine with just a few Products
installed and just a few users to map roles to, which you would have to map
Permissions to.

Then a lot of stuff was added, most of it very cool, but not always fitting
into the original concept. ZClasses where the best and the worst idea of all
at the same time. And they also are a good example of a Zope component that
was over-hyped at first and then dropped like a hot potatoe (others are XML
support, Mozilla support, and to some extent even the CMF). Before ZC
started the documentation efforts, a Zope newbie would have no clue whether
it was better to work with ZClasses or file-based products.

Now things are, to an extent, even worse. To work with Zope and really get
the most out of it, you need to know Python (even in the ZMI, as Python
scripts are the preferred way of coding little helper methods), DTML
(because ZPT can't do everything), and ZPT. This is really confusing for a
lot of people.

The thing I hate most is that there are really useful helper methods and
classes in lib/python/App (and also in some other obscure places) that are
frequently used by the ZMI itself. But this stuff is mostly undocumented and
obviously written by ZMI-designers for ZMI-designers. E.g.: Zope copypaste
support is cool. But there is no easy way of using it in customized user
interfaces, as all the methods return you back to some ZMI page.

So while obviously Paul is right that Zope 3 should be focussed at the
developer and mainly provide well-tested, well-documented, low-level tools
for doing great things, Zope (3) will only survive if we get a lot of a lot
people using it. And as most people are NOT developers, they will need
end-user products that are based on Zope. Otherwise Zope will get lost.

If Zope 3 is meant to be a developer's tool then it will play in the league
of BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere. Those products are powerful and expensive.
And they are so complicated to use that you need experts to work with them.
So the market segment is very interesting, but limited to large corporate
clients.

Most of the users Zope currently has are probably using it as an alternative
not to an application server but to either Apache+PHP/Perl or to a CMS.
Virtually all the hosting customers we have at iuveno run no custom
products. Some of them use existing ones like Squishdot or the CMF, some use
ZClasses. So for them Zope IS the product, not the platform.

Most of the consulting jobs Zope services companies can get will not be in
the 100.000-1.000.000 EUR or $ range, but smaller in size. So the budget is
large enough to customize an existing product, but not to write one from
scratch, regardless how cool the platform is. I am quite sure that you can
write a lot of stuff much quicker in Zope/Python than you'd get it done in
Java, let alone C. But still that's not good enough to survive. My opinion
is that what we as Zope-using services companies will need to survive is
ready-to-use products we can easily customize. Plone is one of those, though
I personally don't like all of it that much, Silva is another.

And now comes the part where the Zope community can fit in: Most CMS I know,
Zope-based or not, just try to do the same thing in slightly different ways.
I am positive that as an open source community we could do MUCH better if we
shared more of the development, not only on the Zope-level, but also and
maybe even mainly on the application level. For me, Zope 2 is not perfect,
but good enough to base applications on. So I would not necessarily need
Zope 3 from that point of view. It is also hard for me to contribute to Zope
3 if it stays so abstract.

An example: Contributing to the object hub is hard if you don't 

[Zope-dev] Plone/Metadata/FUD

2002-10-02 Thread James Johnson

I've been around the Zope/Python scene for many years.  One thing I see this 
group suffer I believe if from the groupthink mentality.  Imho Alexander 
Limi 2 cents worth demonstrated Erik's point perfectly.   applaud the 
effort made with plone.  I believe it to be a spoon in which we can spoon 
feed newbies into the CMS side of the Zope way.
  Seem my post regarding Zopezen.org.  Plone is slow.  Zope with CMF is 
slow... Not as slow as plone, but the issue is with ZPT.  There is no way 
around it Erik is right.  Developer time being spent on speeding up plone in 
order to backport the improvements to Zope/CMF sounds... Well arse 
backwards.  Plone has its place, but I suspect some doublespeak here, lets 
be realistic about it.
   I debated a long time ago about CMS being the core of Zope anyway, but lo 
and behold they pushed on with a CMF product.  I see plone as being the 
same, a product. Now my understanding is that with Zope3, they will roll a 
lot of the CMF functionality into Zope3 Hmm go figure?  All that time 
wasted on maintaining 2 products Zope/CMF has proven cumbersome at the least 
imho.  Now just imagine if the community would have listened to the lone 
voice James-then/Erik-now where we would be today.  We all know that the 
decision back then was based on commercial interest for ZC and others trying 
to market some industry catch phrase.

   So I hear you Erik, you have these wonderful, bright people working on 
special interest projects, but not on the core issues that allow Zope to 
have that strong core that it needs to move it forward.
  With it being evident in how the Release early/Release often mantra has 
been thrown to the wayside, I'm left wondering what do I do next with my 
2.5.1 site?  Do I go the plone, 2.6, 2.7 or 3.0 route?

   Like I said before, as a qoute from Mr limi you should not mix in the
Plone name if you do not intend to follow our guidelines.
TM.  Plone is a major benefit to the community.  Please keep up the good 
work and effort.  I believe that the master minds behind it all should be 
working to make Zope3 a reality for the plone product and not the other way 
around, hence you'll screw up mixed-up people like me even more.  I hope I'm 
making some sense with this.  I understand that this is free software, but 
as I community we should work toward making sure that we all can have a 
voice and benefit from plone/zope 2.5-2.6-2.7-3.0/CMF/Thingy.

  I'm sure I'll have to take a loan out on this, because it's more than 2 
cents worth ;-).

Peace,
-- James
I am a Washington State Citizen.
Spamming this Email Address may be against Washington State Law
Chapter 19.86, and 19.190 RCW. http://www.wa.gov/ago/junkemail/protect.html



At 05:08 PM 10/2/02, Alexander Limi wrote:

quote who=Erik Lange

  In the install-script for MMM Skins, we call it a plone rip-off...
  I've  suggested that we change the product name to Plone skin to Alan,
  to  recognize the fine work of Plone, and to make it clear what it is: A
  skin  that gives your CMF-site a Plone-look, and nothing more...

As one of the two designers of the Plone skin, I thought I would send you
my 2 cents on this.

Most welcome ! :-)

Not to be harsh, but calling your skin anything with Plone would just
cause confusion, as it has none of the distinguishing marks of the
original look, apart from the blue color.

Nevertheless people constantly assumes that we use Plone on our sites... so
it must have something in common with the Plone 'thingy'
...

Check:
http://www.mmmanager.org/Members/erla/1018802975267402990/talkback/1018829961

You break almost every consistency rule and design decision in your skin,

Yep - the rules set up by Plone - not the rules of CMF ;-)

That was what leed us to make the product in the first place...

and it is nowhere near being Plone, neither from a usability nor a design
perspective.

Nope - and we're proud of that ;-)

I will not comment further on this, I find this discussion a bit
far-fetched. Plone is a separate entity, and you should not mix in the
Plone name if you do not intend to follow our guidelines.

I agree :-)

And we don't intend to follow your guidelines.. sorry.. but why should we ?

How about CMF Zlone skin for a name ? ;-)

Or CMF BTTF Skin ? BBTF = back to the future ;-)

Is it okay that we thanks Plone.org for the inspiration and basic layout in
the next release ?

Or should we simply just blame it all on Canada ? *ROTFL*

Regards,
Erik






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