Following Guido's famous pronouncement about Django, more than one Zope developer complained of being ignored in the discussion about Python frameworks (read the comments). Indeed, Zope 3 seems to be invisible to many Python developers.
Here is an attempt to give some reasons for this Zope Blindness. It's important for me to say that many of these points are being actively worked on at the moment. In a future post I will comment further on what the Zope 3 community is doing about them.
11. (tongue-in-cheek bonus) Many Python developers seem to include badmouthing Zope among their hobbies.
9. It is treated like a second class citizen at zope.org.
8. There is no official Zope 3 web site, which there really should be, given 9 and 10 above.
7. Zope 3 needs a little hype. Many Zope 3 developers seem to think "marketing" is just an ugly word, or that it is not needed. This mailing list thread is illustrative.
6. Hip, Modern frameworks like Django and TurboGears thrive in the blogosphere; Zope 3 developers still mostly use good old mailing lists.
5. We live in the era of the "20 minute wiki" or the "10 minute blog" and Zope 3 is not cut out for that.
4. From an outside perspective, Zope 3 internals still seem to undergo
constant refactorings that can break existing documentation.
3. There is API documentation, but new users need other kind of docs, like articles and follow-along examples.
2. Many Python developers find Zope 3 too complex, or are under the impression that it is somehow "unpythonic" (or, like Guido put it, that it requires developers to "drink lavish quantities of their particular flavor of kool-aid").
1. Zope 2.
The last point is unfortunate, but is true on so many levels that it will require a post of it's own to discuss.
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