Thanks for your reply Kevin. You answered most of the other questions that didn't get answered before. The advice is helpful. As far as hosting, I've already got a dedicated server in California. So I'd rather try to make this work on it before paying someone more money to host a site of mine. But my problem is, with the dedicated option, I don't have root access. I can choose to have it co-located, which would mean I would have root access. But that means I would be managing the server myself without any assistance from them. So now I'm learning Linux and networking et al so I may be able to manage the server myself remotely. A couple more questions: Does Zope help with the organization of "html" files? Is it easier to know where stuff is, or find if you don't? Off-topic Linux question: Is there anyway to remotely administer my server with an X Window interface like KDE? Thanks again, Brian Kevin Dangoor wrote:

Hi, Brian

I'm not sure I saw responses to everything, so I thought I'd just throw in my couple of cents...

-----Original Message----- From: Brian Salisbury <brian@hilarious.com> To: zope@zope.org <zope@zope.org> Date: Sunday, September 05, 1999 11:16 PM Subject: [Zope] The Honest Scoop on Zope

...

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?

While this is something I have not personally run into yet, I can tell you what people have reported in earlier messages on the list. A decent box (not even top of the line) running linux can do 1 million relatively complex hits per day. Zope is a good performer out of the box. Assuming you're running one of the most popular sites on the net and you're getting more than 1M hits per day, Digital Creations has announced something called "ZEO". This allows you to distribute synchronized Zope DBs among multiple machines. *That* should handle just about any performance requirement.

...

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.

My experience has been that it is. My experience has also been that if there is any kind of reliability problem, the DC guys are there to help (free of charge), because they want this to be a very, very stable platform. On my site, Zope has run continuously and has only been restarted when I needed to restart it for something. In other words, I've had no problems with it going down.

...

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.

Right now, Zope is not amazingly easy to learn. It has a lot of deep and powerful concepts, and the documentation is in a state of flux because of the big switch from Zope 1.x to Zope 2. That said, I think the learning curve is worth working through because the platform does so much.

Zope has a really helpful user community and quite a few very active developers. You will start seeing a lot more prepackaged solutions. Though I'm fairly familiar and comfortable with Python, I don't think you even need to use python for the *vast* majority of applications because of new capabilities in Zope 2.

...

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.

Zope *can* interface with an external (ie not part of Zope) database such as Mysql, if you want it to. There is no reason it has to. (I don't use an external database). Zope works as a long-running process, as does a database server, so there is generally not a lot of overhead in using a database if it makes sense for your application.

<snip>........................................</snip>

...

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.

I give a lot of credit to DC. Those guys are very sharp and have made an excellent product. This has really encouraged all of the subsequent development.

Kevin