Hello,
i have been reading about zope and plone for a few days now, and i have a question that i could not find an answer to.
i understand zope is a server, that is, it is a process in OS. from what i could gather from the documentation, plone is a cms built on top of zope.
Right!
why then when i install plone for windows from an msi, it appears that plone is also a server that runs alongside zope server just on a different http port?
Because the Plone windows installer includes a complete Zope installation. That's what you see as a server "alongside" your other Zope server. You can run many Zopes on one box.
in addition, why the plone documentation keeps referring to plone as a server, and is using terms such as "start plone" and "stop plone"?
Because they assume that anybody installing plone on windows probably doesn't care about Zope per se and it's simpler to think of the whole thing as "plone". This may not be accurate, but I guess it lowers the bar a bit for people just getting started.
i hope this is the right list to post this kind of plone questions. if not, i apologise, and i would appreciate if you could redirect me...
This is a great place for general Zope questions; anything Plone-specific should go to one of the Plone lists, most likely the plone-users list. See: http://plone.org/contact/ There's also a #plone IRC channel on freenode. -PW