[ZWeb] Not another ___Nuke site, please

Ausum Studio ausum_studio@hotmail.com
Mon, 13 Jan 2003 11:55:37 -0500


Wow! What a busy weekend. Although many statements have already been
discussed, I just want to contribute with my two cents, as a member of the
community commited to Zope and nzo (with ideas and time), and who firmly
believes that "the world of Zope content is only as good as Zope.org"
(quoting Paul). Of course I'm not among the just-feature-requesters because
inspired by the winds of last year efforts for nzo, I've been writing code
in the sense of my suggestions. You can find info about them at the bottom
of this message. Cut to the chase:

The role of Zope.org

Let's face it. We are competing with all sort of CMS systems out there.
Many people believe like us that we are leading the OS content management
game, but unfortunately the 'loosers' are getting the fans. Why is that?
One possible reason is that czo isn't contributing to give people the image
that we have in mind when we think about Zope. Zope IS "the swiss army
knife of the web", but czo is saying it's less than any 'nukish' community
system. (Please remember I'm talking about outsiders' subjective
impressions).
So, given the chance to upgrade it, why to conform ourselves with the
weblogish style? Why to resemble the accomplishments of PHPNuke, or
PostNuke or AnythingNuke? Do we really need Zope to look like it was just
another nukish site? I say no way.

What nzo could have in the context of the work already done and the
timeframe we don't have

I say Personalization. Let's make it all personal that it could be. We know
Zope delivers fine in this subject and IMHO we need to make nzo more
personalizable than SF is claiming to be. Do I really  need to download
(and store) products that are less sized than the mean overall size of the
pages I'm browsing at?  Isn't it better that nzo remembers what I've
already 'downloaded', so that I don't need to fill my local file system
with dozens of tiny files?
Do I really need to open the whole ring of Zope sites to get to know what's
going on with the community? Isn't it better to make nzo to show me
relevant external content by means of advanced syndication?  If I was a
seasoned Zope developer, do I really need to see the "Zope is this",
"Download Zope here"  pieces of content, every time I open nzo?

Zope has largely sold the concept "develop faster". I'd like to add the
concept "move faster throughout your site". DHTML menus has been out there
for a long while but they really haven't been seized in the way a content
management system would require. So at least a basic level of navigation
facilitator menus-based is also a must, in my opinion.

To Plone or not to Plone

-1 to Plone. This is out of the scope of this message but you can read my
statement on the subject as a reply to the following thread:
http://www.zopezen.org/Members/huima/News_Item.2002-11-19.0150


The stats issue

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Three solutions come to mind:
> (...)
> - Use an undo-less separate storage for the counters
 +1
I already know that this stats things isn't going to be a priority in the
nzo schedule, but Guido's idea is meant to be not only the solution for the
problem, but also a natural long-time-awaited addon to Zope.

----

As I said, I have some code that can further explain the sense of my
suggestions. You can find their info here:
http://www.zope.org/Members/ausum/CMFPortlets
http://www.zope.org/Members/ausum/Pilot/index_html


Just like George, I'm one of the guys who have volunteered for the project
and that is just waiting for the orchestra director to raise his arms. :)
Much of the last year's ongoing work was stopped because there were bugs
related to the new nzo tools and the LDAP server, so that if they are
already solved, I'm willing to continue with the job.


Ausum