Hi everybody, I was thinking about trying to develop a social-networking site, like myspace.com or facebook.com (well, on a much smaller scale of course). Elements I'd like to make available for the users are: - profile with photo gallery - blog - instant messages to other online users - chat functionality - forum/discussion boards - "internal" mail system - ... (should be extensible) After looking for information for quite some time, I am still not quite sure what to do: 1) Do you think Zope/Plone would be the right thing for this kind of project, or rather some Java CM-system (with better performance maybe since it is compiled and not interpreted?) or some PHP-system? (not a fan of PHP, to be honest... I favor python) 2) Now, the main question: Zope or Plone? I don't completely understand the difference between these two... I would really appreciat e some help/other opinions on this matter. Thanks a lot, Martin
Think of Plone as extended Zope. Plone is Zope plus many of the capabilities that you are asking for above. Plone is built on top of Zope. Plone is Zope plus added value. Also take a look at CPS (http://www.cps-project.org/). It, like Plone, is built on top of Zope and is Zope plus added capabilities like Blog, Wiki, Forum, Chat, ... CPS provides a WYSIWYG editor that enables you to customize the look and layout of the pages of your portal. And, compare with Silva (http://www.infrae.com/products/silva). You may also want to look at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/, where you can do feature comparison charts on CMSs (content management systems). CPS is listed under Nuxeo, the company that supports it. Dave -- Dave Kuhlman http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman