Re: Zope site testimonials needed
We have just finished implementing a news publishing system for "IDG Now!" (http://www.idgnow.com.br), the Brazilian tech news web site of IDG (http://www.idg.net). It is the most popular web site of its kind in Brazil, and Brazil was the 6th largest IT market in the world in 1997. Thanks to the exceptional design of Zope, whenever the project presented us with a new challenge we very often found that the solution was trivial. It is obvious that the DigiCool people have already faced most of the problems web developers might encounter, and implemented their solutions in Zope. In a few cases we resorted to External Methods, mainly to encapsulate long sequences of DTML which had complicated logic and would be used repeatedly. Also, because it was so easy to re-use solutions from one part of the site to another, we actually managed to deliver several modules one week BEFORE the deadline, so since April 8th all editors were already using our system to publish their stories. During the week before the April 15th deadline we made minor adjustments responding to user feedback, and implemented a few features not in the original requirements. All of that was very easy too. Since yesterday the last module is fully operational. Because of special circunstances which we cannot discuss, it was a requirement that the system used no server-side applications (IDG Now! is currently hosted at the largest content provider in Brazil, UOL http://www.uol.com.br; the site runs from a very large Sun machine which hosts hundreds of other sites). So the Zope application runs inside IDG's intranet in São Paulo. The pages are exported to the file system before being sent via FTP to UOL. SSI is used in the public Web server in order to support a very dynamic side-bar and footer which contain links to other stories. The include files are also generated automatically by the Zope application. About 40 new pages are generated daily. Our first professional experience with Zope was a pleasure and a success with the users. We are now looking forward to an oportunity to put Zope to full use, running on a public server. I (Luciano) have been developing high-profile web-sites since the early days of the Web in Brazil (1994). I've had the opportunity to work with high-end products such as NetDynamics, Silverstream and the deceased Netscape Publishing System. None of them comes near Zope in supporting web-sites which are a mixture of structured and unstructured content (most are exactly that). With Zope you get to choose the level of automation to implement in different parts of the site, taking into account the frequency of updates, the skill level of the people responsible for updtating and the complexity of the updates. This allows you to provide your customer with a highly cost-effective solution. Finally, we would like to take this oportunity to extend our most sincere compliments and thanks to the people at DigiCool, who have developed a fantastic tool and are now allowing us to share in using it and further developing it. It is very exciting to be part of the Zope community. [ ]s Luciano Ramalho and Jose Octavio Hiperlogica Solucoes Internet Sao Paulo, Brazil
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Luciano Ramalho