[Zope] Zope vs. PHP

[Ben Glazer]

In the process of evaluation tools for designing database-backed dynamic web
sites, I have narrowed the choices down to PHP and another product which you
may have heard a few things about, Zope.

I have a few questions about Zope.

1. Do any tools exist to make it easy to upload/download an entire website?
What about transferring the Zope database over FTP?  (The real question here
is "How do people backup their remotely-hosted Zope websites?")

2. Is it easy to have multiple Zope databases?

3. Is there an easy way to do a global search-and-replace over an entire
Zope-based web site?

4. Is there a way to write DTML macros?  For example, presume that in my
site, I always open tables like this:

	<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%">

Is there any way to write a dtml tag, say "dtml-table", to abbreviate this?
I'm not very familiar with Zope yet; is there a better way to accomplish
this task?

Additionally, how easy is it to code new DTML tags?  I'm relatively
well-versed in Python.


Also, if anyone has used both Zope and PHP, I'd be very interested to see a
(more or less) objective comparison of the two.  Clearly, this forum favors
Zope.  Are there situations in which PHP is a better choice?  Has anyone yet
written a detailed comparison of the two products?


Thank you very much in advance for any help or suggestions you have to
offer.  I'm extremely impressed so far with the quality of Zope and the
responsiveness of the Zope community.


Thanks,
Ben