SiteScripter

Site Scripter

A site scripter is someone who creates ActiveContent. They are both a content manager and a programmer. They create one-off applications using templates and scripts. They don't need to know anything about the component model and they don't need access to the site-management parts of Zope.

When someone starts using Zope, they will probably start as a scripter. They probably know how to create HTML pages. If they are familiar with creating dynamic pages, they may be familiar with Javascript or other page-embedded scripting technologies like ASP or PHP. They don't consider themselves to be developers. They don't care to use a lot of discipline. They just want to get things done easily and quickly. They like "quick and dirty" solutions. The things they build are one-off. Hopefully, we'll make it easy for them to quickly solve problems and get lots of early success.

[Application developers]? follow a more disciplined approach to better handle the complexity of bigger systems. For the developer, separation of concerns is important. Tools for organizing, managing and evolving their work over time are important. The techniques they use are necessarily a bit more involved. They are willing to learn more advanced techniques to solve their more difficult problems.

If and when the needs of a scripter go beyond what they can do with scripting, they will have a choice:

• Learn how to do development in Zope 3. Development is more disciplined than scripting. The discipline is necessary to handle the increasing complexity of their applications. They will need to learn some new concepts and techniques. We'll make this transition as clean and graduall as easy as we can.
• They might just decide to hire a Zope developer to take them to the next step.