Christopher Petrilli wrote:

Um, what does this have to do with Zope? [...] I'm just affraid you've made this a MUCH larger issue than it is.

My point is that designing an interactive web site is the same as any other software project. For simple projects, you can throw them together with any old thing and it will probably work. Zope would be overkill for something simple. But simple projects have a way of growing and becoming more complex. And I have used plenty of tools that worked great on demoware, but failed miserably when used for the real, large-scale project. I'm just trying to share my experience working on larger projects in the hopes that the people on this list will be able to avoid the mistakes I've made in the past.

I'll say this up front, which is that if you have hard and fast rules about how things must behave to be "usable" and a system doesn't mean those rules, why don't you just move on, rather than trying to spin the world into your own orbit?

Because Zope looked interesting initially, and I thought the authors (and Zope users) might be interested in my observations. Like I said, your mileage may vary. If you haven't seen it already, take a look at Phil Greenspun's web site at http://photo.net for lots of interesting discussion about database-backed web sites. --Curtis