Greetings I am a Zope newbie but have been using python for a little while. I am a member of the team responsible for rebuilding my departments webiste. I have suggested that we create a portal site and use a CMS and other some-such. ... Does zope have any kind of back door so that pages can be edited with vi or emacs?
If you indeed want to use a CMS, you can take a look at CMF and Plone. The CMF framework uses a skins system to build it's presentation layer, and skins can come from either the filesystem of from TTW ZODB-resident objects.
Is there command line access to the zope server database?
Yep, and it's neat. Using:: zctl.py debug you can get live access Zope from a Python shell. Described here: http://www.zope.org/Members/dshaw/AdvancedSiteSetup Also there is ZShell, which should give you a Unixish shell into a live Zope. http://www.zope.org/Members/jerome_alet/zshell --jcc -- "My point and period will be throughly wrought, Or well or ill, as this day's battle's fought."