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

[Dylan Jay]

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
> 
> Please keep replies as succinct and factual as possible. I'm really not 
> interested in a winge fest by people who've been frustrated in the past. 
> I'd much rather have constructive feedback on where the pain is and, if 
> possible, suggestions for how to improve things.

One thing that I think works well is generic setup. In that I understand 
that its where I go to have things configured on install, I can look and 
find examples of how other products have done it by doing a simple 
search for all "catalog.xml" for instance. So by saying it works well I 
mean its easy to understand and easy to use (from the filesystem, not 
the zmi portal_setup which is confusing).
I just wish the roundtrip worked better (or I knew how to use it). I 
want to get it to export all the changes I've made from teh base plone 
say and have the result be able to be dumped into my filesystem profile 
without edit. At the moment portal_setup export gives me all teh base 
config from plone defaults.