[Zope] OSES project - should it run under Zope?

[Cees de Groot]

Hi all,

I was off this list for the last half year or so, so I'm in for some catching 
up :-). In the meantime, a couple of quick questions:

I'm starting up a new project, Open Source Educational Software (www.oses.org 
for more details). Basically, I want to get people from various disciplines 
(teachers, pedagogues, graphics artists, programmers) together to work on 
classroom-software. The site must be highly collaborative, and friendly to 
non-technical users. Software will be mostly written in Java, so it can run on 
any box with a browser.

Q1: is Zope the best environment to do this on? On the collaboration part, 
Zope's user features are great, and Confera is ok as well, but other things 
are lacking (chat, public file repositories, interfaces to CVS maybe, talkback 
areas at the bottom of most pages, etcetera).

Q2: call me crazy, but I think that WikiWikiWeb is a great collaboration tool 
(http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki). There is a Python version, but I'd like to have 
this running inside Zope so you can apply Zope's management features to it. I 
talked to the author, he's interested, but maybe this alread has been done?

Q3: if the answer on Q1 is "yes", are there any Zope gurus out there who want 
to help me on structuring the site, maybe writing some of the utilities that 
are missing? One of the reasons for picking Zope is that I'm considering 
making the add-ons for collaboration available as part of the project, so that 
schools can run Zope (Zope fits the OSES requirements for platform 
independence, that's a very big benefit).

Q4: (this should be an easy one - maybe I've missed a FAQ somewhere?) What's 
the easiest way to have "last modified ... by ..." on the bottom of each page?

Thanks in advance,

Cees
-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg@cdegroot.com>