[Zope] Zope startup questions

[Alexander Limi]

Hello.

My name is Alexander Limi, and I am part of a project that considers very
strongly to switch to Zope for our development. I have a few questions that
I would like to know the answers to, so if you can assist me in this, I
would be very grateful.

First, a little summary of our project is probably useful: The goal of the
project is a kind of a national version of mp3.com - but for Norwegian
citizens (not exclusively, but this is our target audience).

Currently, we have over 300 artists that each need their own management
console for uploading mp3's, pitures, html etc.

We originally intended to develop the project in PHP/mySQL, but quickly
realised that it would be very inefficient from a developmental view. So,
before we take the plunge, so to speak, I wondered if you could answer the
following questions:

1. What is the status of the mod_zope development? Our ISP runs apache, and
the solution with apache and PCGI is not exactly the ideal one.

2. Localization - we would like to implement the whole site in two
languages - English and Norwegian. Any useful tips? Any finished Products
supporting this?

3. Performance - how does zope compare to PHP/mySQL in terms of
performance? Our box is a dual Pentium 180 with 224M RAM and SCSI disk
subsystem running linux. 10Mbit connection to the internet.

4. Security - how secure is Zope? Our sysadmin is pretty paranoid (as he
should be :), and I'm just wondering how secure it is. Field experience
comments welcome :)

5. OO-database system - the default behaviour of Zope is to store
everything in the database - including pictures and MP3s. We plan on
distributing the MP3 files to several servers, and construct an object that
analyses the load on every servers every time a user requests a download.
Obviously we should separate these files from the main database, as it
would become extremely big after a while. Does anybody have any experience
with solutions for doing this? And would linux' 2GB limit on files pose
problems for the main db-file after a while?

6. This is a bit specific, but anyway: users should be able to write
"http://mp3.no/artistname" and be sent directly to the artist with that
name. Does Zope have any specific mechanisms for doing this?

Thanks in advance,


Alexander Limi
-soon-to-be-zopatista?- :)
MP3 Norway - http://mp3.no