-----Original Message----- From: Oleg Broytmann [mailto:phd@phd.russ.ru] Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 1999 22:57 To: Paul Everitt Cc: Zope Mailing List Subject: Re: [Zope] Front door on the Zope web site (Was Re: [Zope] SmartWorker)

On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Paul Everitt wrote:

...

This is a very, very important thread to me. I'm looking for two things:

o What questions should the Zope.org home page, and pages one click away, answer?

o What are some effective ways to answer those questions?

Currently Zope.org oriented primarily toward Zope developers. If you want to restructure the site to attract business eyes, I think the following questions are important:

Q1. Frontdoor: What is Zope, how it can improve your business, why opensource platform better suites your needs.

And some parts of answer for Q1:

<B>Zope</B> is <small>free, open-source</small> component-based object-oriented <B>Web application platform</B>.

Zope can improve your business by allowing you to develop your Web applications easily, with rights tools. Zope is free, thus making your applications cheaper. Zope is open-sourced, thus allowing your developers to understand every aspect of its internals. Zope conforms to standards. Zope talks HTTP/FTP/WebDAV/FastCGI/etc protocols.

I think you need more detail than that. In a seminar I was going to give to the lucent web comunity (but due to funding this fell though), I put a lot of thought into what were the main advantages for my use of Zope. I came up with the following: · Maintainability through ZOPE's unique object database that enables a natural separation of data, business logic and presentation, allowing flexible 3-tier architectures. · Support for code reuse and 3rd party plug-in functionality. · Robust and high performance integrated SQL database support that makes creating dynamic data-driven applications simple. · Web based collaborative authoring. · No downtime when making large changes through use of versioning. · The advantages of using an open source and cross-platform technology. · Data intergrety through intergrated transactions. I think since Zope is coming from a more underdog position, a good analysis of where it is better than the 'comercial' competition would be good.