[GLLUG] Zope developers

[Edward Glowacki]

On Sun, 2003-04-13 at 20:48, Alex Nelson wrote:
> Hello all!
> 
> As long time lurker and occasional poster, I have my own set of
> questions to pose to the list: Have any of you used Zope for a medium to
> large scale web application?  What pros/cons/gotcha's would you advise
> someone to look out for? And finally, how many of you have real
> experience with Zope development? (Production class, business work to be
> specific.) Any feedback or comments you can provide would be greatly
> appreciated. Feel free to add any additional info you think might be
> usefull. Thanks in advance for your help!

After Dave's response, I have to chime in that my experience with Zope
hasn't been as negative as his.  This may really depend on what you're
trying to do with it though.  I was looking for things for a relatively
small group of users at work to have for intranet/extranet content, with
side goals being to find one I could use myself for a personal site.

I looked at:

- phpnuke
- xoops (a derivative of phpnuke)
- postnuke (a derivative of phpnuke)
- xaraya (a derivative of postnuke)
- envolution (a derivative of postnuke)
- Zope, CMF, and Plone

Obviously, with all the forking done to phpnuke, that community is
somewhat fragmented, and modules/blocks/whatever written for one system
may or may not work in another system.  Some of those projects also seem
to want to rewrite major portions of the code, and thus are struggling
to reach 1.0 releases.  

Zope is a mature product, and in combination with CMF and plone provides
a seemingly more complete experience.  This is not to say that Zope is
without flaws, I just found it to be better for what I was trying to
do.  The plone interface is very nice, and very clean, which is a
definite contrast to most of the phpnuke-like sites, which
out-of-the-box have a very cluttered appearance.  Working with plone is
actually one of the more pleasing computer experiences I've found
recently, and I found when using it on my own site [1] that I'm simply
able to "just get things done" without too much hassle.  I'm hoping that
perhaps we can make use of Zope/CMF/plone at work to facilitate keeping
our web pages up-to-date by allowing people with minimal training and no
html skills to manage content.  The big problem right now is Zope's
security model, in that it's not real easy for us to authenticate
against AFS and to protect content by groups.

In terms of Zope development, I haven't done any, but from what I've
seen trying to get various products to work with Zope, it's probably
going to take some time to understand.  Zope is a big product, and
there's a lot to learn about how pieces interact with each other, i.e.
what calls your product has to support, how to integrate permissions,
etc.  The advantage is all the other stuff you get once you do integrate
properly.

-ED

[1] The new version of my web site (running on Zope/CMF/Plone) is at:
http://hurakan.cl.msu.edu/glowack2/


-- 
Edward Glowacki <glowack2@msu.edu>