Gabriela López Ruiz wrote:
The principal characteristics that a platform like what we are looking for has to have are: • licenses (it has to be open source),
Check.
• if it has a rich set of products,
Check.
• it it has a great users community,
Check.
• if there is many available documentation (in Internet, in bookstores, etc),
Check. The Zope Book does the most things. After that it gets worse, the documentation on the complex things are dispered or non-existent. But the community is then quick and responsive!
• the possibility of integration with external databases,
Check.
• if it has a security model (and how strong is that model),
Check. Very flexible, very strong.
• if it gives the possibility of avoiding the interaction of a web master in all deployments,
Check.
• how many languages does it support and which ones,
All and None. :) There are tools for making the websites translatable, and then it can support any language you want.
• recommendations concerning the base product to be taken, which of these options is better and why: CMF + ZOPE, ZOPE only, CMF + PLONE+ ZOPE,
Since you have limited yourself to Open Source, I think you should use Zope + CMF + one of the CMF based systems, like Plone or CPS. Is Silva based on CMF? Plain CMF sucks too much.
• if it’s easy installing new products and developing applications,
Developing new applications is Zopes forte. That's one of the major reasons it's so great, development is quick.
• about Clear Case integration,
I have no idea.
• and what about stability/performance
Excellent stability, OK perfomance, good scalability.