[Zope] Is e-commerce feasible with Zope?

[Diego Dainese]

Hi all,

I'm a Zope newbie; I working for a little support company that
realizes (above all) dynamic Web sites with Apache + PHP; I've already
worked with these tools but I feel that PHP is too limited for this
complex duty, mostly because I'm accustomed from long time to such a
powerful language as Python; thus for my next project I would try to
employ Zope+Python instead.

The problem is that as with many other commercial project I've a
strict deadline to couple with.

For this reason I need at least a confirmation that Zope is the right
choice for this project; if it is, I've no problem to invest some time
to learn how to use it efficiently. Obviously I would be very happy if
you will give me some hint on how to proceed also ;-)



The site I must realize is a e-commerce site very similar to amazon's
one. The products catalog will reside in another site (not handled by
us), and from this site when a customer clicks on a product, a script
on our site will be called with the product's code as parameters. 

The script will add the product to a shopping basket; later the
customer can proceed to the checkout. Here she/he will be able to
create an account on our site for later shopping.

What I need is:

- A means to implement the basket; with Apache+PHP I would use a
  simple file containing a list of product codes, or an SQL table.

- A means to set a cookie on the client browser and to associate the
  it with a basket; with Apache+PHP I would use a SQL relation
  cookie->basket, or I would put in relation the basket filename with
  the cookie.

- A means to store the products database; with Apache+PHP I would use
  a simple SQL DBMS.
  
- A means to store customer informations on the site; with Apache+PHP
  I would use another SQL table, with a relation one to many to store
  the (possibly) many customer's addresses.

- I would let the site to be accessed both via https and http.

- The site must be easily internationalized, thus I must be able to
  replace all the text in the pages with a translated version; with
  Apache+PHP I would use an include file where to store the text
  messages as PHP constants.

How can I implement all this using the "Zope's Zen"? ;-)

If you need some other informations I would happy to give them to
you. 

I greatly appreciate any kind of help.

Bye,

-- 
Diego   | To reply remove the `x' and swap the | Sorry for my
Dainese | words around the `@' in the address. | bad English.