This is from an excellent post to comp.lang.python, and would be an excellent addition to the "front door" Zope website: Evan Simpson <evan@tokenexchange.com> wrote:
There has been a lot of discussion lately on the Zope mailing list (zope@zope.org) about making this sort of information more readily available on the website, but here's a brief intro:
Zope has several parts, which work well together, but are all optional:
1. ZServer: A Medusa-based multi-threaded asynchronous server which accepts HTTP, FTP, and monitor (special Python client) connections. Usually, it passes requests from these connections to...
2. ZPublisher: An ORB which converts HTTP, FTP, XML-RPC, WebDAV, etc. requests into traversal of an object hierarchy and returns the result of rendering the target object. These objects are normally stored in...
3. ZODB: A versioning, transaction-based object store with automatic object persistence and conflict handling. ZODB stores an object hierarchy as a single file (2GB limit being worked on) and appends new versions of objects when their request transaction is comitted. This allows extensive undo, and requires occasional packing to eliminate old, unwanted versions. Most HTML is generated by standard Zope objects using...
4. DTML: An embedded language similar to ASP and PHP, except that expressions are written in Python and have access to the full power of the rest of Zope, including...
5. Acquisition: A feature of standard Zope objects which allows them to change their behavior automatically based on the context in which they are called. Hard to describe, but very powerful, as are...
6. Products: New objects or collections of objects can be added to Zope by simply installing a Python package in the Products subdirectory and resetting the server. Current Products include database adapters, threaded discussions, virtual host managers, and many others. Of course, if you don't want to learn Python you can always create...
7. ZClasses: Object classes defined through the web management interface by assembling standard Zope parts. These can provide a wide range of customized objects.
I haven't really gotten into the user/role/permission security model, or the extensive web management interface through which you typically interact with Zope. I may have forgotten other bits, too. There's a lot there :-)
-- ========================================================= Tres Seaver tseaver@palladion.com 713-523-6582 Palladion Software http://www.palladion.com