[Zope] Why I Love Zope: Success Stories (BEWARE: sappy stuff inside)

[J. Atwood]

I run at least 7 or 8 Zope sites of varying shapes and sizes for 
about a year now and everyone once in awhile I just have to take a 
moment and reflect upon how much easier Zope has made my "web" life. 
There are some of my stories (que the music)


- Recently someone took notice of a FAQ on one of my sites (thank you 
KnowledgeKit) and was trying to figure out how I kept it updated and 
allowed for user submissions. As I told them about the process 
(submit, email, edit, approve, go live and added to "new FAQs") I 
just realized how cool the system really is and how much easier it 
had all been to do in Zope. The kicker was when I mentioned I had the 
same system for the links (Thank you SimpleURL). They were stunned, 
to say the least. Go Zope.

- My Brother recently had a child and not only was I able to set my 
new niece up with a area on the family site but gave my Father a 
username and password and about five minutes of instructions on how 
to get images into the photo album (thank you ZPhotoAlbum). I went to 
bed while he scanned away and published a series of pictures all by 
himself. Not only was he totally impressed with the system but in the 
content management features. Of course a link went out to all the 
family to come and take a look. Zope can now add a new tag line 
"Father Friendly."

- I have been slowly getting Zope into more and more projects at 
work. We are now at about 5 Zope sites. This really shouldn't seem 
that amazing except for the fact that I in order to build the very 
first site in Zope I had to battle for about two weeks with 
arguments, case studies and ultimately putting my job on the line. 
Now, when building a new site they don't even question what I will 
build it in. Zope is CEO friendly as well.

- Two of our sites at work were built at the same time. One in Zope 
one in JSP. Everyone worried about the Zope and how it compared to 
JSP (Tomcat). Fast forward a few months when the consultants who 
built the JSP site are gone and the two sites need content management 
and updating. I spent a little time with one user teaching them how 
to update some stuff with versions etc and they have been happily 
doing so ever since. The person who is responsible for keeping the 
JSP site updated has been struggling with code, FTP issues, compiling 
problems, etc. After about a month of struggling with her updates and 
changes she noticed the other user easily go in through his browser, 
do a quick change and make it go live. Fireworks erupted. She had a 
TIZZY! "DID YOU JUST CHANGE THE HOMEPAGE THAT EASILY? HOW CAN YOU DO 
THAT? WHY CAN'T I DO THAT?! OH MY GOD!!" To which he simply replied, 
"I don't know... I think it is cause it is Zope" (not really knowing 
what Zope was at all).

(last one)

- We were building a new brochure site (simple, graphic, etc) and the 
graphic artist who knows a bit of HTML but mostly works in 
DreamWeaver and has done a few Zope updates and image uploads in Zope 
before is heading the project. I set up a Zope server for him, gave 
him a username and password and basically went on to another project. 
A few weeks go by and I went to check to see how things had been 
going thinking that he would probably need me to get the data up 
there and start building the site in Zope. Not only was the site 
already built with DTML navigation that he had put in for location 
specific buttons but he was working on the second version of the 
entire site in a version. I was totally stunned.

Just a nice set of stories for you to share with your peers when they 
ask you why you should/would or do use Zope.

If anyone else has similar stories it would be nice to hear them.

Cheers,
J