I am trying to motivate the use of Zope / Zcommerce, and to do this need some timing ideas - Does anyone have thoughts on how long (man hours per expertise) it took them to go from no Zope to (Zope + Steve Spickelmire and Co's EMarket) and to a successful transaction?

Hopefully this will be of general interest for anyone doing a business case or planning, so if you have any thoughts on "we expected x by experienced y" it should make interesting reading.

Zope has a sigmoidal[0] (is that the word?) learning curve. Out of the box it installs *very* nicely on unixen, and you can clickety-clickety around and create folders [1], upload files, and set up a static web site pretty easily. Then you want to connect up a database. My experience is limited to PostgreSQL, but the sigmoidal shape repeated itself. The database adapter dropped in without a hitch, and simple queries worked great. I implemented a reasonable database-backed problem tracking system for our company last summer in about 2 weeks of fiddling around and 2 solid weeks of implementation (my sql/web skills are ok, my python knowledge is um, a work in process). And it has been operating flawlessly for over a year. But then comes the steep part. Anytime you mix several languages inside themselves, things are hard. Productive as hell if you get it write, but hard. With Zope you've got to wrangle HTML, DTML, Python (at least for expressions) and SQL if you're connected to a database. A misplaced quote, comma, or bracket can throw you off for a long time. Ok, we've got the source, but debugging Zope stack dumps can be a pain. But after a while it gets better. I *think* I'm starting to at least see the shallow part of the learning curve at the top, where you can do things like implement a ZClass container that acts like a Dynamic HTML layer in an afternoon. Which I did, but only after 3 very bad false starts. The base Zope documentation needs some work. The HOWTOS and TIPS have saved the day many, many times. But back to the business case. My feeling is that even with the steep bits of the learning curve, Zope is a big win for implementing services. Zope wins because if you do a good job getting things working, you have an incredibly flex able system for dealing with the inevitable never ending stream of change requests. And thats where the payoff is. At list I *hope* so :) -- cary [0] S-shaped. like this ( _/-). shallow/steep/shallow.