First identifying one or two of the "problems". I say problems loosely because it is the flip side of a coin. ZF is under constant development and enhancement. That is a good thing. But it creates a number of big challenges for newbies. As recent as a few weeks ago, I was looking through the documentation in a section that should have been re-written given the changes with 1.8. Now there are new sections added for Zend_App and so forth, which is good, but other related sections that are now impacted by the new bootstrap and new autoloader seem to have been overlooked, or are slow to be revised to show the new way of doing things.
Second, there is almost a cottage industry out there for start-up tutorials. Not because ZF doesn't have one, but more likely because it is a tad bit too over-simplistic. Hence you have Akrabat and so forth out there. Some are maintained (meaning they are current with the latest release), others are not. That isn't ZF's fault of course. But a beginner learning and having to google a bit is faced with lots of outdated explanations and tutorials, and weeding through them is a task in itself. Again, not necessarily ZF's fault.
I think the main suggestions I can offer is to be more rigorous around the documentation set. Version the docs and maintain an archive of those versions. So there is a doc set for 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, etc. If someone is still using 1.7, they need to be able to look up things without having 1.8 ways of doing things creeping into view. Or vice versa. And be rigorous about going through all the sections and updating as needed. So if I am looking at docs for 1.8, I shouldn't see 1.7 ways of auto-loading in the code examples of other sections. At least that is not what I would expect to see. I don't want to be overly critical, because I know documentation doesn't pay the bills, but I don't think it is unreasonable to make these suggestions on how to improve.
The second item seems like it is already being addressed from the reply's of some others. I can only echo the need for more tutorials and better organization of those on the website. One difficulty I've had with ZF is that there are often multiple ways of doing the same thing. For example, there are probably (at least) three different ways of constructing a form (method chaining, array notation, creating the elements individually then attach them with addElements, vs addElement and then defining them via magic methods, etc, etc). Usually the docs only show one of those ways in detail, and are light on another way, and perhaps even omit entirely yet a third or forth way. I don't think the standard documentation is necessarily the best place to show every possibility, because useability starts to get impacted with the growth of details. Maybe this is where tutorials come in. Related to that, often times I've struggled with identifying the pros and cons of the different ways of accomplishing the same task. The docs tend to omit this type of distinction, and it would be useful in many cases to have this provided.
--Seth
-----Original Message-----
From: Franck Delage [mailto:zf@web82.org]
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2009 7:59 AM
To: fw-mvc@lists.zend.com
Subject: Re: [fw-mvc] so complex!
Just to answer to Matthew :
Matthew Weier O'Phinney a écrit :
| First, we do make a number of assumptions: (1) you understand PHP, (2)
| you know how to setup a web server, and (3) you have used and written
| PHP classes. Are these inappropriate assumptions? I'd like to think
| not; how can you accurately judge the benefits a framework provides
| you unless you have a baseline to compare against?
Of course these are not inappropriate assumptions.
A framework is not one of those "softwares" which theorically allows you to build a wonderful website in 10 clicks. It's a tool, and a tool needs a worker.
You can buy the latest beautiful Facom screwdriver, if you don't know in which direction you unscrew...
M, thank you for your work.
--
Franck Delage
Création et hébergements de sites web
www.web82.net
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