Hello! Got in a little late in the discussion. Here is our current setup, for running multiple zopes with multiple instances. It is designed to be self contained with everything needed in one place, and also to be all managed by the user "zope". Can you see any disadvantages with this setup? in /usr/local/zope we have: SharedProducts/ bin/ dist/ doc/ etc/ home/ misc/ sw/ SharedProducts/ contains all the products that are shared between instances (they are symlinked into each instance directory) bin/ contains all scripts needed to create a new instance, to start and stop zope, etc. for instance: instance_make python -> /usr/local/zope/sw/Python2.1.1/bin/python python2.1 -> /usr/local/zope/sw/Python2.1.1/bin/python2.1 zope_start zope_stop zstart dist/ contains the distributions of Zope in use. For instance: drwxr-xr-x 11 zope zope 512 Aug 31 11:39 Zope-2.4.0 drwxr-xr-x 11 zope zope 512 Oct 31 21:06 Zope-2.4.1 drwxrwxr-x 11 zope zope 512 Oct 31 15:27 Zope-2.4.2 by convention they are named Zope-<version-number>. We use this in our scripts. Also every Zope-dist directory has a settings file specifying what python it wants to be run with. Also used in our scripts. doc/ whatever docs we need, such as "How to compile Python" etc etc/ contains sitewide settings, such as a list of instances in use, and general configutation files: env.conf instances oracle.config.in sys.conf z2.conf the *.conf files are used to set values for all the settings possible according to the info in z2.py, sets a lot of env.varaibles and directory locations, etc.. home/ contains one directory for each instance we use. The instances directory structure is as follows: Extensions/ --> whatever extensions to use Products/ --> Products in use - symlink from SharedProducts access --> emergency user password file import/ --> import dir inst.config --> a sourceable sh.script sourced by the start script contains instance specifik settings (use FTP, WebDAV, etc) log/ --> _all_ log files end up here var/ --> the datafiles are stored here that's everything needed to handle an instance. misc/ contains stuff we need to manage our installation. ie. we have our download directries here, and general crap-area sw/ contains our python installation(s), our apache installations, etc...