From: "Montagne, Michael" <montagne@BOORA.com>

I'm very excited about learning Python and Zope. I'm a win98 user and just today upgraded my service with my ISP to host my web page from home.

Congratulations on becoming an internet host provider. I hope you have a firewall in front of your PC to help protect it from attacks over the internet. Does your ISP help out there?

So I need a web server.

I hope you realize that win98, while an OK platform for prototyping a Zope application, is not a sufficiently reliable platform for a professional website. But, because Zope is largely platform independent, most things you learn about it will be transferable when you decide to upgrade the webserver's operating system.

According to the docs, Zope comes with one. If I use that one, am I going to be over my head initially?

The ZServer that comes with Zope is about as easy to install as Personal Web Server. Go for it.

Should I be using a different product if my site is not going to be super dynamic from the beginning?

A reasonably fast PC has processor cycles to spare if all it is doing is serving a small web site. Users won't even notice that pages are being generated on the fly. If processor speed should ever become a limitation, you will have several courses of action that do not involve changing your Zope-based application (e.g. processor upgrade, front-end cache).

If I use Personal Web Server, can Zope be integrated later?

I don't think so (but I'm not positive). Still, if you need a regular web server, use the Windows version of Apache. It will be a little more complicated to install and maintain, but you'll be learning an industry-standard program. Subscribe to an Apache mailing list, if you need help managing it on your PC. If you don't need a regular web server (for serving files outside of Zope), stick with the built-in ZServer.

Can I use Web authoring software such as Front Page 2000 and publish to Zserver?

Yes (with limitations that you can read about by searching the archives of this mailing list), but you may find that you no longer want or need to. Usually 90% of the complex HTML in a web site is in the framing of the content -- i.e. the headers, footers, and navigation. This kind of repetive and/or computed HTML is the kind the you will program Zope to gather in one place, and reuse for all requests. The individual content of each page very often uses the simple sort of HTML that you can either code by hand or create in simple HTML-aware editors.

thanks so much, -mjm

-- Hope that helps -- Loren