[Product-Developers] Re: Where does it hurt?

[Dylan Jay]

Dylan Jay wrote:
> Martin Aspeli wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> Following a long discussion with Dylan Jay (buried in another thread 
>> on Devilstick terminology), I thought I'd conduct an informal poll.
>>
>>  ==> As a customiser of Plone, or as someone wanting to build bespoke 
>> components that extend Plone, what do you find most confusing?
>>
>> I think this could fall into a few categories:
>>
>>  - Areas where there's insufficient/poor documentation, but once you 
>> learn how to do something, it's clear how to proceed.
>>
>>  - Areas where there appears to be more than one approach, and it's 
>> not clear which one to choose
>>
>>  - Areas where Plone doesn't appear to have a good way to do something
> 
> I think it hurts the most when something goes wrong. I write something 
> that I think should work, it doesn't, suddenly I'm faced with understand 
> everything I'm relying on.
> Debugging is a nightmare. Perhaps I'm not using the right tools. but 
> generally I try to read the code, which with the amount of indirection 
> these days is pretty hard to read. The fact thats its not obvious where 
> the definition the code I'm after is makes it harder. For instance I was 
> trying to find the schema definitions fot ATCT the other day... and 
> thats just z2. Trying to work out how to the standard templates got 
> connected in in plone.z3cform was even harder.
> I'm not 100% sure how to fix this. A tutorial on how to read code?
> The slow startup time makes this worse of course because one way to try 
> and fix things is to try different stuff and see what happens.

another example from yesterday. I wanted to override the standard plone 
search.pt form. I want to keep using browser views. When I typed /search 
  (without the @@) it would give me the old form, but if I did this in a 
subfolder I get my new form.
So first thing I try to do is search the web. traversal precedence and 
stuff like that. No luck.
Imagine you're learning this stuff. How do you know what to do next?