I'm new to the list and hope this is an appropriate place to post
a basic question. Our business has a need to prototype a portal
application. A friend mentioned that Zope might be worth
investigating as a possible platform. I'm hoping that the readers of
this list can offer some guidance.

OVERVIEW
This portal will be a public media sharing site, not too dissimilar
from the old MP3.com site (or kind of like the current garageband.com
site). Public users need to be able to create an account. Each user
with an account will get an automatically created, somewhat
customizable 'homepage' within the site. They will be able to self-
publish their media, add it to one of the site's directory categories
for browsing, and add a searchable description. Each homepage will
have a list of that user's media that other users can browse/play, a
description of the user, a mini-blog for the user (with comments).
Each piece of media will have a way for other users to rate it (the
average rating being displayed), report it for abuse, and add
a 'review' to it. Reviews will have a "Was this review helpful"
option (like Amazon).

The main page of the site will have a browsable category directory,
search function, as well as an automatically generated "top ten"
list, a "most recently added" list, a "higest rated" list, "featured"
list etc. Each category will have its own sub-page with the same
items on it.

This site will start as a low volume prototype (a few hundred users)
but we hope it will need to eventually scale to tens of thousands.

Your opinions please:

- Is Zope a good platform for this type of application?
- Are there any sites like this built on Zope?
- How far can Zope (and existing Zope addons) get us toward this
goal? (halfway? more?)
- Are there any Zope addons that we should particularly look at?
- Any caveats or concerns we should be aware of?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

--- Mark