--On 15 December 2002 12:48 -0500 Kyler Laird <kyler-dated-1040578352.848fde@lairds.org> wrote:
This is going to be a horribly-formed request, but I'm looking for some guidance on evaluating a product being pitched. The product is UNICON Academus. http://www.unicon.net/academus/products/overview.html
It's based on uPortal http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/ a "free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher- education." UNICON's offerings appear to be closed and, at least for the authoring tool, MS Windows-only.
I want Free tools. uPortal is better than something like Blackboard, but it still has some severe limitations due to its licensing.
Whoa. Don't confuse UNICON (about which I know precious little) and uPortal (about which I know a bit). Have you read the uPortal license? <http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/license.html> I don't see any cause for concern there.
I'm wondering if I can confidently say that Zope can readily perform the same functions.
I think you can get a powerful framework like Zope +/- CMF to do reproduce uPortal. But you'd have to write the code first. There are some interesting developments like CMFPortlets <http://www.zope.org/Members/ausum/CMFPortlets> which show what is possible but they have some way to go to match uPortal. The University of Bristol wrestled with this question for a while - and then jumped both ways (uPortal for portal framework, Zope for CM framework). You can read more at: <http://www.bris.ac.uk/is/projects/portal/portalbytes> Paul
I like using Zope for most everything these days, but every time I go to battle against CMF, I come away ready to continue using other methods for awhile. I suspect that CMF is what I would need to use to get uPortal/Academus-type functionality without starting from scratch.
So...any opinions? I'm looking for comments like "Zope can't touch Academus without a *lot* of work" or "Oh, yeah, just fight through CMF and you're almost there." Specifics would be great, but I'll be happy just to get some insight. (If there's something besides CMF that can handle this role, I'll be especially interested.)
Of course, I'd also be happy to receive offers to provide Academus-like functionality in Zope using Free software for a price on the order of that of Academus. (I don't know how much they charge yet, but I will soon.)
Thank you.
--kyler
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