On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 11:04:12PM +0100, Mark Barratt wrote: > John Poltorak wrote: > > > > I was on a course over the weekend where ordinary people in their 70's > > with no technical ability were knocking together websites in just a few > > hours with no prior training and no understanding of the > > underlying concepts involved. Why should Zope be just as easy? > > Because Zope is hard. You can make some great sites/applications with > Zope but for all except the very simplest you need > > . advanced understanding of html and xml > or > . a thorough grounding in programming principles > or > . a working knowledge of Python > > - and preferably all three.
Whilst Zope can be used for developing extremely complex sites, that shouldn't preclude it as a development tool for simple sites. I think expertise only develops through extended usage of Zope, but there is just so much to learn, although I don't see a need to be an expert in numerous fields before touching Zope. > Most (not all) of the people who hang out here have all three of these > skill sets, and like many skilled people, they find it hard to > understand that the skills they have seem arcane to beginners. You > should also understand that nobody (AFAIK) is 'them' with an interest in > making Zope easy and helping you. You depend on the kindness of > strangers, so politeness and gratitude pay. Yes, I am aware of this. I also think that this list is not really appropriate for newbies, but in the absence of an alternative, this is where I ask my newbie questions. > In addition, Zope is heading fast into even less friendly territory. > DTML, which is technically 'mucky' but reasonably easy to grasp for > non-programmers, is increasingly deprecated. Through-the-web editing > likewise. I'm not saying these trends are bad, just that they are > happening, they make the learning curve steeper, and that they lock out > almost all casual users unless they have the skills noted above. > > The alternative in the Zope world is Plone, where you can get a site up > and rolling in very little time (as long as you are happy for it to look > and operate like almost every other Plone site on the planet). I looked at Plone but it is way too slow for the server I'm using. Besides that customisation looks like another learning cliff. > or there's PHP, where the communities are probably more newbie-friendly > and there are loads of tutorials. I'm sufficiently aware of Zope to know it provides a far more comprehensive build environment than PHP ever will and I would like to adopt it as my platform of choice, but it would be nice if the ZOPE support community was as newbie-friendly as the PHP crowd. Loads of tutorials and worked examples would be nice too. Reading a manual is no substitute for being shown how to build a web page using ZOPE and just reading through dozens of isolated examples of ZPT techniques makes progress very slow. I would much rather see a tutorial which starts of with a relatively complex but easily reproducible template which creates an interesting page, but then proceeds to de-construct what it does and how it does it. > or you could decide that Zope does some stuff which you must have, in > which case David H's stereotypical response > > > If you spent more time just *learning* Zope and HTML, etc and less time > > rationalizing your lack of progress everyone would be happy. > > is appropriate. I only need to rationlise it when people constantly keep telling me to read the Zope Book as if that is the solution to everything. Fortunately there are a few people here who can still remember suffering the same plight as I am currently in an I'm grateful to them for their help. > Good luck. > > -- > Mark Barratt > Text Matters > > Information design: we help explain things using > language | design | systems | process improvement > ______________________________________________________ > phone +44 (0)118 986 8313 email [EMAIL PROTECTED] > skype mark_barratt web http://www.textmatters.com -- John _______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )