[Zope] - Slashdot on Zope

[Gabe Wachob]

I wanted to ask the list what people's thoughts were on the
appropriateness of implementing a Slashdot-like site in Zope.

I have looked at the Slashdot source code (in perl) and its pretty messy
(to put it mildy). I hacked at it to get it to work with the free Sybase
server  on linux and it works reasonably well, but I haven't gone much
beyond that.

If a slashdot-like site were implemented on Zope, would an external SQL
database be neccesary, or would the internal object database be
enough? For searching?

Building the Slashdot-style site on Zope has the attractive feature of
being very customizable and modular from the get-go (something which
Slashdot source code is trying to get to). Slashdot (the site) gets a
LOT of traffic -- would a zope server be able to handle the (what I'm
guessing is) hundreds of thousands of hits per day? Do we have to wait
until the Medusa integration is complete (not that throwing together a
slashdot clone can be done before digicool folks can get that done).

One thing I'm wondering about is upgrading. Assuming that the slashdot
clone is upgraded regularly, how does this affect product instances
already in the object store (this is a general zope question). My
understanding is that straight pickling is done -- only data is
serialized, so if I change methods, I should be able to use new versions
of products with objects created by older versions of a product.. But if
I add or delete attributes, then I have to be careful...

Finally, does the concept of a slashdot-like Product (or set of
products) interest anyone?

    -Gabe