Grant Street wrote:

I'm still a newbie at this. I have heard about the "portal" features in zope 2 but I'm wondering what gives zope this? is it a product? is the added owner role?

I'm wondering because I'm interested in creating a portal and I don't know where to start?

Ahh, I'm sure everybody else in the world is just as unclear about exactly what constitutes a portal! Here's our take. Jakob Nielsen (sp) defined a portal as "news, search, and directory". We took that, added membership, and set our goals on creating a portal toolkit. Since we began construction on the new zope.org (www.zope.org:18200), it is apparent that workflow is a fifth element of a portal. The most important word in "Zope Portal Toolkit" is the last one. Just to make sure everybody understands, don't expect Zope to contain an out-of-the-box, ready-to-run "portal". Instead, our goal is to create a solid foundation that folks like Digital Creations (us), Butch (Squishdot), Kevin (km|net), and others can construct directed solutions. Search is the most important part, and Zope2 addresses this with ZCatalog, which also does the news part as well. Our position has been that the remainder wouldn't become available until after we used it ourselves on the new zope.org. We're making progress and learning quite a bit. Getting the Zope2 release out has definately taken top priority away from the portal toolkit. With Zope2 final out, and the new zope.org site finishing, we'll have a chance to step back and get our portal toolkit story up to date. --Paul