Answering questions about TurboGears

Today marked an interesting milestone. TurboGears’ Google Group now has 453 members (up about 100 in the past week), which gives it more members than cherrypy-users! Google has upped the traffic category to “medium”, so another 141 people have wisely chosen to sign up for the announcements list.

Given the fast growth and the size of the list, I find myself answering a lot of questions about TurboGears. According to Google, so do bonono, Elvelind, Ian Bicking, Jeff Watkins, Bob Ippolito and Phillip Eby. There are a few people who are also active on IRC (#turbogears at freenode).

In don’t-repeat-yourself style, I try to avoid answering the same question twice. There have been quite a few documentation updates that have sprung out of mailing list exchanges, and I’ll definitely keep that going. (The “comment on this page” links in the site have also been good at catching things! There’s been a number of good Trac tickets since I added that.)

Some of the questions are harder questions, because there are some things that TurboGears is perfectly capable of, but there’s no “standard way” to do it. The plan for the upcoming 0.9 release is to answer a few of the biggest no “standard way” questions. With the commentary and the code contributions that are coming in, things are looking good.

If you’ve ever had a “why can’t a web framework do this for me” sort of question, now’s a good time to pose it to the list. It just may be that the answer is TurboGears 0.9.