How hard is it for non-programmers to learn Zope? Would PHP be easier? How many of you guys graduated from Python to Zope? If I only know HTML can I realistically
It all depends of what you want to do. In any case, wathever you want to do, you'll do it faster with zope than with php. Altough those are really differents things. Think of php as a programing langage, think zope as a web development plateform written using another programing langage (python). Some of the things I learned in a few month with php, took me less than a week to do with zope. With zope, some of the work has already been made. I stopped php development because I had the feeling to rewrite each app from scratch. This doesn't happen with zope. I would say that zope may be harder to understand at first, but it is _so_ easier to make reusable elements for future websites that you should really go the zope way.
...learn anything beyond the very basics of Zope or am I looking at learning Pyhton in parallel?
The "very basics" of zope (I mean some dtml, understanding of "the way it works") will let you build complete websites in a far better way than before. In any case, it's better to use zope only with your html knowledge, than the time it would take to learn another langage. My (totally biaised) view of zope. But wait, I discovered zope 3 weeks ago, php 2 years ago, so I'm only biaised by the little amount of time I got results with zope. Results matter... Philippe