There are many sites with instructions on installing ropemacs, but so far I couldn't find any with instructions on how to use it after it's already installed. I have it installed, or at least it seems so, Emacs has "Rope" menu in it's top menu bar. Now what? So far I could use only "Show documentation" (C-c d by default). An attempt to use code assist (which is auto-complete, I presume?) only causes Emacs to ask about "Rope project root folder" (what's that?) in the minibuffer and then showing nothing.
So, once ropemacs is installed, what are the steps to see it in action on some simple python scripts? Something like "if you have this script in your emacs and put the blinking square here and press this, it does that" would be an answer.
(I've been thinking if I should ask this or not for some time, because nobody else seems to have the same problem)
You can set the root folder with rope-open-project . Once you've set the root project a .ropeproject dir will be created. 
Inside it, a config.py file has hooks where you can run (python) code once the project is set. The project_opened(project): function is a good place to run code. I usually activate the virtual environment imp.load_source('/path-to-env/activate_this.py') , so that I can get source coverage for other libs in the virtual env.
ropemacs USAGE tutorial