eg. just say i had a zclass called "articles" and each article has an "author" and a "date". i then create 100 instances of this zclass. how could i display all the articles written by a given author or on a certain date ?

You could either: (a) tool through all of them searching for the values you were after (yuck), or (b) use the ZCatalog stuff ZCatalog is a full-text and fielded indexing engine for Zope. The New Zope Site uses ZClasses and the ZCatalog EXTENSIVELY. IMO, ZClass instances + ZCatalog are analagous to Notes views. --Rob