This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz by Carlos de la Guardia. Original Post: Grok, Zope3 and the Pink Panther's dream house Feed Title: I blog therefore I am Feed URL: http://blog.delaguardia.com.mx/feed.atom Feed Description: A space to put my thoughts into writing. Latest Python Buzz Posts Latest Python Buzz Posts by Carlos de la Guardia Latest Posts From I blog therefore I am

Now that I am a fan of Grok and had such a good experience developing my first app, I decided to make a few improvements to my webexperiments site.

Since the plan is to publish experiments and links every couple of days, a natural and much needed improvement would be the addition of RSS or atom feeds for new items. I reasoned that since Zope3 is a mature framework and lots of code has been written for it, finding an existing syndication module would be easy.

That's when I ran into the Pink Blueprint problem. Maybe I'm too old, but there was a Pink Panther cartoon (you've heard about the Pink Panther, right?) where someone is building a house and the panther keeps trying to force the builder to use his (her?) own blueprint for the house. After a lot of fighting the builder seems to give up and goes away, leaving behind what appears to be the panther's dream house. At the end of the cartoon, the panther enters happily into the house, but when the door slams shut the facade of the beautiful pink house, which turns out to be just a wood cutout, falls down to the ground, revealing the ordinary blue house that was really built.

After the nice experience on the Grok site, this is how it felt when I tried to go to the zope3 website to find the RSS module. First, the 'official' website is just a wiki. Now, there's no point in having the yearly marketing discussion on why Zope3 needs a real website, so I'll let it slide. But there was no page on the wiki about zope3 packages or libraries, the only link to a list of packages points to the main Zope SVN
repository. That's not helpful at all.

A quick browsing of the FAQ led to a question about creating RSS feeds, but it only contained a link to an unexisting zope-cookbook.org site. That's a little bit frustrating.

Before anyone tells me, I know that many Zope3 packages and libraries can be found at the Python Package Index (PyPI). That's good, because I can quickly install any of them using easy_install. The thing is, there was no link or mention of the PyPI anywhere on the wiki's front page. You can find one mention inside the ComponentArchitecture page, but that seems non-obvious to me.

Also, while it is great to have many zope packages up there on the PyPI, I still think a good components page is needed. Of course, everything can be found if you dig into the site, but that's precisely the point: prospective users will not do that (plus, it's ugly, the site does not invite one to dig into...no point denying this).

Keep in mind that I'm writing about the user experience going from Grok's web site to the Zope3 wiki, not about the technical merits of the framework. I wouldn't even be writing this if I didn't think Zope3 is a great framework.

Grok is a great step in making Zope3 more user friendly. Happily, its website also indirectly gives Zope3 a nicer, more polished first look. Maybe it should become Zope3's entry point on the web.

For now I added a link to the PyPI to the wiki. As I learn Zope3 through Grok, I'll try to create a simple page describing the more useful packages that I come across.