[Seaside] Returning to Smalltalk, learning Seaside, some observations and questions.

[Steve Beisner]

I like Seaside; so much that I'd like to raise some questions
about co-lateral items like documentation, the website, and books.

My background:  I've been programming "forever".  I first saw
Smalltalk demoed at PARC back in the seventies.  I've flirted with
it for years, and was blown away by Seaside as well when I first
ran across it years ago.  For a variety of reasons I'm picking it
up again after a half dozen years. A lot has changed for both
Seaside and Pharo since I last looked, so I decided it'd be
worth my time to try to bring a "beginner's mind" to it, and work
through the website, community resources, documentation, etc.

In short, I'm a fan.  I don't want to offend anyone with these
questions... perhaps it's just my ignorance, but I'd like to help
fix some problems I noticed as a new user coming to the Seaside
site. Here's what I notice:

- Seaside, itself, is obviously under active development by some
  really smart people.

- Is the website not maintained? I lot of stuff looks WAY out of date.
  Most of the listed Blogs have changed their focus from Seaside, or are
  defunct, or haven't been updated in five or six years.  The
  "Success Stories" are stale by years.  Ditto for much of the "Projects"
list.

- "The Book" (Dynamic Web Developmment with Seaside) appears to
  be stalled. Early in the book it says,

      "The online version is always up-to-date and permits
      readers to add notes at the bottom of every page."

  This appears to not be the case (not up-to-date, and I see
  no way to put comments/notes/questions anywhere).

  The "First Component in 15 Minutes" section references what
  seems to be an old version of Pharo: different terminology,
  different menus.  (I am using the 1 click package with Pharo
  and Seaside.)

- The Seaside email list seems to get some good traffic.  Is there any
  way to search the archives for topics? (I don't see any way;
  my suspicion is that there's gold in the archives, if there was
  only a way to find it.)

- How would one go about helping with getting/keeping the book /
  website up-to-date?

- Has there been any thought to using a forum (or Google Groups)
  as a more efficient medium than a mail list for recording and
  making available information and answers to questions?

Again, I know that having a new person come into a community and
immediately start complaining is a drag -- in a big way!
That's not my intent... I plan to persist along my own path, but
maybe I'm overlooking something?  I'd really like improve my own
familiarity with Seaside and perhaps, at the same time, help make
it be more accessible to those who are not already old hands.

Any suggestions or insights would be welcome.

-SteveB
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