[Zope-PTK] ptk/zope newbie question- please read

[Dan L. Pierson]

Chris Withers writes:
 > Sean Kelley wrote:
 > > Problem is, without any responses to my questions I am beginning
 > > to think that the PTK is very rough and any investment into it now may be a
 > > mistake.  
 > 
 > The PTK IS very rough right now (I await the flaming ;-)

No flames, I agree.  In fact, it's in the midst of a particularly
rough spot while the Zope 2.2/Membership/ZPatterns changes confusion
gets sorted out.  It's been a few weeks since I've looked at the CVS
(been over in LocalFS-land) and at this point I'm not sure whether any 
combination of pieces are useable without hacking.

 > 
 > > My concerns are that the PTK will not be easily upgradeable, and I
 > > cannot get as much community support for it as I can with other products
 > > like squishdot, etc.  
 > 
 > I don't think this will be the case...

I don't think it WILL be either.  Right now there are some basic
architectureal problems being worked on in a very new product.  I
think that we all would like to provide as painless an upgrade path as 
possible, but we can't figure out how to do that until we understand
what we'll be upgrading to.  For example, there's widespread agreement 
that the previous PTK design to have the details of each document type 
wired into the base level of the PTK was wrong -- it means that to
make many of the most basic and common site design changes you have to 
get way down in PTK guts that most users should never have to be aware 
of.  We don't yet know *exactly* how this will change, or how we will
then arrange to convert existing documents.  Maybe this isn't much of
an issue because the document classes will stay the same but thier
location will move, maybe there are more problems.

 > > Is it less ready than other products
 > > like squishdot?  

Yes, at the moment.  It's the way of the future as Chris says, but it's 
not there yet.

The good news is that we seem to have a good team of volunteers who
want to solve the problems and are capable of doing so.  The bad news
is that all of us have other problems that take priority from time to
time and that the whole environment is changing rapidly around us with 
Zope 2.2 and the evolving ZPatterns world.  I really expect that
things will stabilize more after the 2.2 revolution settles and other
critical bits (like Squishdot!) fit into it.