[Zope] - Newbie questions

[Konrad Hinsen]

I just downloaded and installed Zope, and I am impressed to see how
easy that is, even under AIX. So the only remaining problem is doing
something useful with it...

I am interested in Zope for a specific application, and before I invest
lots of time in learning how to use Zope, I'd like to ask the experts
whether my project is doable at all with Zope in its current version.

My application is an collaborative dictionary project (real-life
dictionary, not the Python data type!). The dictionary would be a set
of "concepts", each of which would have a definition and any number of
terms in various languages, plus any number of labels that indicate
categories. Any entry (term or definition) can have any number of
comments attached to it. A small number of people would be authorized
to change entries (using a special password), but anyone would be
allowed to add comments.

So far this looks perfectly doable, although I don't know yet how.
But there are two further features that are important:

1) The dictionary will be multilingual; terms, definitions, and
   comments must be stored as Unicode strings (or any other internal
   format that is sufficiently flexible). For display and entry,
   they must be converted to and from an ASCII representation, and
   users must be able to choose between several possible representations.

2) The current version dictionary must be available for download as an
   XML file corresponding to a specific DTD.

I don't mind if it takes some Python coding to get this to work, on
the contrar y :-) But I'd like to know whether this is doable at all
without rewriting 90% of Zope from scratch. I am also interested in
any pointers to similar projects, particularly useful sections of the
manual, etc.

Konrad.
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Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr
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