[Zope] - Slashdot on Zope

[Paul Everitt]

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

Your email this weekend finally prompted me to make the decision on
Tabula and to announce our intentions on doing a Zope-Slashdot.
 
Here are my plans with this regard:

1) Create a mailing list for "Zopespot", the name of the community
project that coordinates this.

2) When Ken gets here, make him the shepherd for the project.

3) Publish my stab at the requirements document.

4) Turn the zope.org site into a legitimate contender for best
portal/community site on the Internet.  We intend to invest pretty
heavily in making the Zopespot software and the content on zope.org a
shining example.

5) Work with others (lwn.net, python.org, etc.) to offer it.

> 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?

With the Tabula software available for the Zopespot project, I think
you'll be pretty impressed.  I loaded a 23 Mb portion of the Internet
movie database into a Tabula on my P166 laptop with 64 Mb running NT.
Search times for a combination fielded/full-text search came back in
under a second.

Tabula, which is under the tutelage of Jeffrey Shell here, is a serious
piece of gear.

Briefly, I see Zopespot as filling the following goals:

  o Well-organized site with discoverable, timely information.

  o Harness the energy of contributors.  

  o Apply editorial control.

  o Provide added value for members.

  o Demonstration of software potential.

  o Lower our admin burden while raising scalability.

  o Integrate many kinds of resources.

  o Adhere to applicable emerging standards.

Zopespot could manag the following kinds of Items:

Packages, Documents, News, Projects, BugReports, FeatureRequests,
Members, Discussions, CaseStudies, BuzzReports, JobListings, Polls, Ads,
etc.

Each Item will support and expanded Zope Framework protocol for managed
content:

id, title, category, keywords, last_update, owner, meta_type, isVisible,
summary

Users will have a variety of ways to browse and search content.
 
> 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

The current Zope software with Tabula outta beat that pretty easily on a
reasonable hardware.  Zope2 will make it easier to add more juice to the
object system.

> until the Medusa integration is complete (not that throwing together a
> slashdot clone can be done before digicool folks can get that done).

I'm a BIG fan of organizing the requirements before marching off on such
an ambitious project.

--Paul

Paul Everitt       Digital Creations
paul@digicool.com  540.371.6909