Jamie wrote:

You make it sound like there is more to learn with Pylons. But in all fairness, you could also say: "Having to learn Django's templating language, Django's Object-relational mapper, django-admin.py and manage.py utilities, and Django's URLconfs all at once sucks."

I actually just did, and it wasn't that hard. For reference, my first message to this list was exactly one month ago, Dec. 20, 2006, and started with:

""" Hi all,

I am evaluation Pylons with the hope of porting a large webapp to it. So far, I am loving it. Thanks for the great work. Now, I am having a small problem with the Flickr tutorial... """

As you can see, a month ago, I had just started with Pylons (and Myghty, SQLAlchemy, Routes... newbie on all the tech involved). Yesterday, our first Pylons module for said webapp passed client's acceptance, and it will be put into production by the end of this month.

I am sure our experience in webapp development juggling various technologies helped. Last year, before Pylons, we had worked on 4 different projects, all of them involving different tech:

- our in-house custom framework (Zope, DTML, TAL, custom ORM/MVC...) - A client's custom Java MVC framework (XSLT, custom everything-else) - TurgoGears with SQLObject and Kid - PHP with Smarty, Maple, and a client's custom ORM

But anyway, I think the trick is just to realize that Pylons being a thin glue between other components, you are bound to be browsing for documentation on different sites for these other components. Actually, after the initial "tutorials" phase and "Using SQLAlchemy with Pylons" wiki page, I only went back to the Pylons site for documentation for the Web Helpers. Otherwise, most of my browsing time was spent in the SQLAlchemy docs.

So my only practical advise is this: use a tabbed browser that lets you save the state of open tabs (Opera does this by default if I remember well, and there are extensions to do it in Firefox), create a new window with a tab on each of the top documentation page for each of the components you will be using, and save that. This may sound simple, but it does help.

And bottom line: while there is, I am sure, space for improvement, the current Pylons docs and tutorials worked for me.