Henk Schets wonders:

- how easy and reliably can I manage my virtual hosts (about 8 sites right now) ? Very important.

The SiteAccess product contributed by Evan Simpson is a popular solution. http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/SiteAccess2

- how stable is Zope regarding to Apache on Linux ?

That's how "the Zope Folks" at Digital Creations run Zope, so I'd guess it's about a clean as can be. However, there is more than one approach. Probably the easiest is ZAP, which comes with a preconfigured Apache. http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/Products/Zap Start here: http://www.zope.org/Members/guy_davis/install_routes Below is the tip of the iceberg from a search on "apache", at Zope.org http://www.zope.org/Members/shaw/HowTo/ApacheFrontEnd http://www.zope.org/Members/nemeth/howtos/zopeandapacherh61 http://www.zope.org/Members/anser/apache_zserver http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/HowTos/ApacheRewriting http://www.zope.org/Members/kedai/apache_zope_fcgi

- we have a MySql database, is it easy to connect with Zope ?

Lot's of folks use MySQL with Zope, and there's a ready made "DA" (database adapter) just for this purpose. http://www.zope.org/Members/mordred/ZMySQLDA

- can I access the Zope internal database with e.g. ODBC ?

So far, no. New and interesting ways of storing Zope Objects are being developed though, so let's not count this one out. - can I use log analyzers to get some statistics about our site ? Zope does do some logging, but I don't know much about that. Maybe someone could answer?

- any advice about migrating an existing site ?

One handy item that I have used is Jonathan Farr's LocalFS. This way you can keep serving static pages and images "directly" from a local file system, and frees you to decide when the time is right to turn all those icons into Zope Objects. http://www.zope.org/Members/jfarr/Products/LocalFS Also, leverage your MySQL for all its worth. The more stuff you can abstract into tables and treat as lists, the more you'll like Zope! Later, Jerry S.