Hello List, I've been kicking around the idea behind Zope for quite a while. There are a some questions I have about it. These are things I consider important to publishing on the web. Is Zope scalable? Will Zope be able to support me if my site suddenly becomes popular and I've got to go out buy one of those huge web server machines? Is Zope reliable? I come from windows world, so anything that runs more than 30% of the time generally please me; but, what's serving my web documents and collaboration system has to be extremely reliable. Is it easy to learn? I have virtually *no* programming experience. Everything I've done to this point has consisted of guess-editing pre-cooked Perl CGI scripts. I don't know where to begin learning Zope and, obviously Python, since it goes with Zope. Do you remember what it was like to think of having to 'Program' and getting the shivers? That's me. I've never even looked at source code. I think I compiled some stuff once ;). Most of my web publishing, to this point, has consisted of serving mostly static web files with SSI, and CGI files for interactive stuff. My knowledge is getting fuzzy here. Does Zope directly interact with things such as a Database? I wouldn't want it having to call a process every time a message board action is requested. How endless are the possibilities? In the Web Server/RDBMS world, one just has to program a script to call the DB to do whatever they need it to do. I wouldn't want to have a great idea for my new site, then find out Zope, which I invested all of my time in money in, isn't able to accomplish x-task. Is everything in Zope stored in a (I'm guessing) Object Database? I installed Zope on Windows 98 to poke around. (I tried to install it on my dedicated server, of which I don't have root access, with no success). It doesn't look like anything is stored in a physical file system. I see two potential problems with this. First, I would think it hard to transfer an existing site to Zope. Plus, wouldn't it be very difficult to convert your Zope site to X-Platform should I have the need to at some point in the future? I don't want to paint myself into a corner. Let say I wanted to have someone manage the technical aspects of my Server(s). How hard it would be to have someone maintain Linux, its connection, and Zope? Could I have someone I could call on to write in custom scripts to accomplish what I need in Zope? What kind of expenses would something like this incur in a Linux OS environment? I would like to know how everything works, but I'm afraid I can't do it all by myself. On the same token, I'm not a Fortune 500 company who has money burn. These are generally my biggest concerns. Right now, I'm trying learn to Linux, Networking, and how I can more efficiently run a web site. I'm considering buying a PC that strictly runs Linux so I can have it there full time for experimental/learing purposes. Now pile on top of this the facts that I have returned to school with a full-time schedule, and I'm still maintaining my current site. That means I don't have hours everyday to play around with Linux and Zope. I'd really appreciate any insight you have. If I may say so, it really impresses me what so many folks collaborating together can accomplish. You really are defining the future. Thanks, Brian Salisbury