On Thursday 15 March 2001, at 20 h 2, the keyboard of Jens Benecke <jens@jensbenecke.de> wrote:

In the next couple weeks, I would like to redesign the site completely and -PERHAPS- choose Zope as the development environment.

<dtml-in DevilsAdvocate> Did you consider other free WAS like OpenInteract or Enhydra or Midgard? (Specially the last one since you come from a PHP background.) I'm interested myself because climbing the Zope curve is difficult. I like OpenInteract's smooth integration with all the mod_perl goodies I already use, for instance. </dtml-in>

- Database flexibility. The whole site will run on a MySQL or Postgres database (haven't decided yet) and I probably won't need Zope's internal Database. I guess this won't be a problem.

You can store your data in any external DBMS (I use PostgreSQL). But the Zope objets have to be in the ZODB (I've seen discussions about storing them in the external DBMS, like OpenInteract or Enhydra do, but, AFAIK, there is no easy way to do so at the present time. Zope is quite closed.)

- vi compatability :) I haven't yet found out where the actual files reside,

/var/lib/zope/Data.fs

but one thing I do *not* want to use for regular development is the web frontend. File/Save, or :wa , and refresh the browser window is my idea of development environment ...

Everybody agrees. The Web frontend is for demos to your PHB. The ZODB can be reached with FTP or WebDAV with limitations (versions, some types of objects...). Any FTP-aware editor (I use Emacs and HTMLkit) can do it. As mentioned, the Linux (and only Linux) FTP filesystem (experimental) can be used to enable you to access Zope objects with any Unix tool.