[Zope] (Fwd) Zope musings

[Tom Jenkins]

Hi folks,
We're in the process of evaluating Zope and Cold Fusion.  I'm the 
resident Open Source advocate <g>, so I'd like to make sure that Zope 
has all its benefits given its due.

We're, (well actually Alan is), working on a contract where the client 
requested Cold Fusion so he has some direct experience.  We installed 
Principia back in December and actually are testing it for another client, 
but haven't spent much time with it unfortunately.

Alan has brought up some usage concerns of his and I hope someone 
on the list could respond.  Please don't think that Alan is against the 
product; no in fact he is very interested in it but is just unsure of the 
tools available to help do good work.

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date sent:      	Wed, 17 Feb 1999 10:08:00 -0500
To:             	TomJenkins@zentuit.com
From:           	Alan Johnston <flames direct to me, please [g]>
Subject:        	Zope musings

I don't know why I didn't think of this before.  As you can tell from
earlier comments, I like Cold Fusion studio, the IDE which allows you to
control web page, database, query, and site management all in one window.
It is a very slick way to create web pages in general, whether or not they
include CF tags and CF queries.

But there's no reason you couldn't also use CF Studio to develop Zope/DTML
pages.  You would have to save your pages on a local drive and use Zope's
Upload feature to publish them.  But that's a fairly small price in
inconvenience.  Anyway, the lack of a nice, user-friendly interface for web
page creation is the one klunky thing about Zope (Principia) at our site.
Typing angle brackets and obscure HTML tags into your browser is a fun way
to astound and impress your non-HTML-literate friends, but I wouldn't have
wanted to make a Georgetown/CASS questionnaire system that way.  And,
again, trying to use Netscape Composer, as recommended in the Principia
docs is a sub-par solution.  So this is really the one (only?) area I've
seen so far where CF is way ahead Zope.

So if we want to use Zope for real-world tasks, one important need in the
near term is to find a better way to do actual web page/HTML design and
link that to Zope's cool, object-database approach to Web site management
and its apparent (we haven't tried it yet ... I'm going on the testimonials
here) speed and technical superiority in database queries and interfaces.
(CF uses ODBC ... ugh.)

Ironically, using CF Studio would seem to be a good way to make that link.
I wonder if there are other (free/cheap) HTML editor/site managers out there?



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Tom Jenkins                                              
DevIS  
Linux & Samba 2.0 : The best Windows file server
http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/issue/0,4537,2196106,00.html                                         
"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Romans 12:21