As much as I like the ideas that have been tossed around regarding how to make life easier for newbies, we've strayed far from my original suggestion.
I'm asking for a place where people who have no interest in programming can learn to use OpenACS templates (and applications, I guess). These people are new to OpenACS, but they're not new to the Web or to computers.
Lumping these people together with newcomers to OpenACS is inaccurate: Newbies want to learn the data model, the user-defined functions, the Tcl API, and so forth. Designers don't know and don't care about such things. They just want to get their designs up and running as quickly and intelligently as possible.
Aldert's suggestion about a "code users" forum, separated into categories as necessary, sounds like the closest to what I was originally talking about.
Again: I'm totally in favor of making OpenACS more accessible to new hackers. But if we want OpenACS to move forward, we've got to provide support, and preferably community support, for people who hear the phrase "data model" and imagine a well-dressed computer on a fashion runway in Paris.
