I'm another Zope newbie with a few questions. My appologies if this

message is being sent to the wrong mailing list. this is the list

I'm a final year student doing a project to create a course/personal

management system for my university. I

understand there's quite a lot of similar work going on in this field already.

I aim to create a database to store student information in (using mySQL or Zope?)

or both. This really depends on what you want and how many users you expect . Some user management products (Zopish for components) are flexible enough to accommodate both. ZPatterns and a Zpattern based products (like LoginManager?) allow you to switch from one implementation to another halfway. Experimenting with ZPatterns is not a newby thing though... ;-)

which the user (the lecturer) can add content to (details of grades, etc) via a web browser and use for bulk manipulation of data... sending email amongst other things. In addition, I hope to provide a 'wizard' (in a browser window) to provide facilities for uploading lecture material, news, etc. to the course web page. Going through Zope's 'Elvis' tutorial this seems possible.

this is the realm Zope is suited for par excellence

[Q] Is it possible to present a user with various web forms to input

information (say, a news article with headline

& content) that once submitted will be displayed on the page in a suitable format? I think Zope is capable of this... is Python/anything required. Are there any examples I can look at?

Yes, many. Try looking at Squishdot for a start. It's a flexible weblog style product (http://www.zope.org/Members/chrisw/Squishdot) The Zope Portal Toolkit may provide much of you want, but it's a project in the making (http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK) My own Zope Edu Course Framework (http://www.zope.org/Members/Hoekstra/ZECF) is a product for publishing courses online. It's intended for people with few technical web skills. However, this too is under development

I am in the process of reading the online Zope book - if anyone has any

advice for reading material, I would be

grateful to hear it :-)

watch the documentation pages, they will be much improved within a few days

[Q] There are a lot of Zope products available - am I right in thinking that, say a 'Zope Discussion Board' product, could be download and integrated into a Zope-powered web-site?

yes.

i.e. Are Zope products 'plug and play' TM? ;-o

many are, some are not.This really depends on the product.Most have installation instructions. They should tell you more. hth Rik