[Product-Developers] Help identify Plone's API

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi folks,

We've recently had some discussions about what Plone's "API" looks like. 
The challenge, of course, is that so many things are customisable, so 
"the API" is really a very loose term, when you can call just about 
anything.

That said, I think there are about 50-100 interfaces/tools/functions 
that cover 80% of what most of us do day-to-day. If we can capture 
those, we can do some useful things like:

  - identify which APIs suck
  - identify which APIs we're missing (i.e. we end up having to poke at 
internals when we should have some clearly defined interface)
  - identify where we have duplication and can consolidate APIs
  - document!

As an end goal, I'd like us to extend and refactor the "Manipulating 
Plone Objects Programmatically" tutorial[1] into a more hierarchically 
structured reference manual that covers the most common tasks. Some 
tasks may require references to other tutorials (e.g. the Archetypes 
tutorial), but at least it's a starting point and a place to collate 
future APIs as well.

The current groupings and lists of APIs can be found here:

   http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show/21419197

That mind map is public, though you may need to sign up for an account 
(OpenID support makes that pretty quick if you have that already). I can 
also give you access to edit the mind map if you want to collaborate: 
just drop me an email with your MindMeister user id.

At this point, I'm interested in:

  - any APIs that you use regularly that are not captured
  - any APIs that you use regularly that you hate (whether on the list 
or not)
  - any APIs you wish you had, that you can't find anywhere
  - any comments/suggestions on how to group and structure these

Please leave your comments in this thread.

Cheers,
Martin

[1]http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/manipulating-plone-objects-programmatically

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book