Aha... Feedback... so what I'm hearing is... - Success Stories are a good idea... but who has time.. - Zope Corporation publishes their corporate or well known successes - Lots of Zope/Plone people are at a conference this week. - There are success stories on folks' websites, that aren't well known - ... and finally, "You Go First"... fair enough I'm just glad to hear from others... I will assemble a summary of my project... I'll carve out some time. -Jon Cyr Alec Mitchell wrote:

On Saturday 18 September 2004 09:51 am, Jonathan Cyr wrote:

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Hmmm... no feedback of any kind... sounds like I may have overestimated the community.

Perhaps you have actually underestimated our modesty, though more likely our workload. Many significant figures of the Plone faction of the Zope community are in Austria right now, and working/playing very hard I'm sure. Though I'm think that if you kick this off with your own story, more entries will follow.

Alec Mitchell

This is a Brag, forgive me for the rambling, just getting it out there... Here's my project... I've been working on my project, around my consulting gig, for 2 years... It's called WeddingWeblog.com, and yep its an automated Weblog, and wedding event management system. It's a weblog designed for newbies, rather than the IT geek & journalist audience that regular weblogs serve. I've made it feel more like a scrapbook or diary, than a weblog. It handles events, gift registries, RSVPs, and photo galleries and more. I had been watching Zope for a year, in my previous corporate life, just itching for an excuse to use it... When the company restructured and moved IT ops... I moved to my own consulting business... App Hosting, WebSphere Mgmt, etc. and I got started with Zope. I started out on Zope 2.6.1, on WinXP on my laptop, then migrated to a separate server system, still WinXP, and kept up with Zope through 2.7. I got a VerizonWireless Broadband card on my laptop, and between Zope TTW & HomeSite 5 FTP features, was able to develop anywhere, and did. This Zope TTW freedom allowed me to sit in my car at my favorite lighthouse, and code days at a time. (Beavertail Light, Jamestown, RI, USA) As I finished development last week... I moved the environment to Suse 9.1/2.6 kernel on generic 3Ghz Athlon boxes, set up ZEO on Zope 2.7.2. The system is based on two Python Products, and about a dozen custom ZClasses. The only add-ons that I've used are Formulator, which allowed me to create beautiful validated wizards in my ZClass components, with robust error messages for newbies... I've used PIL, raw to process photos on upload, anti-aliasing in 1.4 works great... VarImage for making custom on-the-fly thumbnails for the photo galleries, as well as for on-the-fly importation into Flash-based scrapbook photo-collages (Photo & Photo Folder would not manipulate a PIL-generated image, VarImage is better for my needs)... and ZEO, because, if I need more horsepower, I can just throw boxes at the problem. I didn't use CMF because, at the time, I needed to abstract this one level out. The system needed to create whole weddings on-the-fly, and CMF seemed to need a person to create the instance, as well as the added complexity of CMF wasn't needed for this project. My background is varied, Having an Engineering degree, my experience has taken me into Marketing, Web Design, Software Design, Graphic Design, DBA, and on.... Jack of All Trades, Master of None... in a good way. A Team of One. Every bit was done by me. I've integrated some Flash pieces and some client-side Java applets into Zope. My Flash photo collages allow users to zoom and scale photos in custom multiple photo frames.... I've used a 3rd party applet called JUpload, which provides photo uploads in a drag n' drop multiple photo tool.... I've used Microsoft's EOT, Embedded OpenType fonts to enhance the romance of the weddings, using formal, calligraphy, and handwriting fonts especially licensed for embedding. I like these Zope features and why... DTML - Being an HTML/CSS expert in a text editor, DTML provided everything I needed early on, and ZPT's ability to use WYSIWIG tools removed control, rather than adding it. ZEO - I read some great thoughts on the Zope list, comparing Java strategies or .Net strategies to Zope... Zope is a little slower, but with ZEO, you scale so easily, who cares... just throw boxes at it... slick. TTW - Through the Web management of the site is awesome, I can remotely make changes anywhere... being a team of one, this flexibility is fantastic ZClasses - I like ZClasses, the concept is sound, and works nicely for simply constructs... If you try to make them do things they're not made for... problems arise... but they work great as website component objects for my project. Nightmare Components for me - Photo and Photo Folder - Great tools for Zope, one problem... if you modify a JPeG with PIL, these components can't use them... Used VarImage instead and added Photo Folder features. - FSCounter - As I upgraded Zopes from 2.6 to 2.7.2... FSCounter broke everywhere, stripped it out... oh well - TransparentFolder - Tried this early, wanted to move like scripts into organized folders.... Great idea, evidently not sustainable as Zope versions increased. Stripped it out, after much pain. Anyway, I hope this little brag helps folks see what I've done with Zope.... and anyone getting married, give me a shout, we'll work out a special Zope user deal. We're just getting started on the marketing... so I've got no numbers or success yet... will report back. Thanks for the brag, who's next, -Jon Cyr WeddingWeblog.com cyrj@cyr.info

Max M wrote:

Jonathan Cyr wrote:

...

Hmmm... no feedback of any kind... sounds like I may have overestimated the community.

More likely you will find that most of us find it of better use to put that kind of info on our websites instead of on a mailing list.

which, with all due respect, sucks big time, because it's not like there is a huge directory of websites where people put their success stories :-) Posting relevant *links* to those stories I think would help a lot, as well as eventually providing the data he asks for, so that we can put all in a nice, good looking matrix. It is really hard to find out what people use Zope successfully. While I do not at the moment have time to prepare a longer statement, I can at least say that we use Zope successfully, both Plain Zope and Plone/CPS based solutions at our organisation. We target a user base of around 10.000 named users. If I have time the next cople of weeks, I will try to complete the data Jonathan asked for. /dario -- -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dario Lopez-Kästen, IT Systems & Services Chalmers University of Tech.