[Zope] university portal

[Lee]

Hi,

I'm another Zope newbie with a few questions. My appologies if this message is being sent to the wrong mailing list.

I'm a final year student doing a project to create a course/personal management system for my university. I
understand there's quite a lot of similar work going on in this field already.

I aim to create a database to store student information in (using mySQL or Zope?) which the user (the lecturer) can
add content to (details of grades, etc) via a web browser and use for bulk manipulation of data... sending email
amongst other things. In addition, I hope to provide a 'wizard' (in a browser window) to provide facilities for
uploading lecture material, news, etc. to the course web page. Going through Zope's 'Elvis' tutorial this seems
possible.

[Q] Is it possible to present a user with various web forms to input information (say, a news article with headline
& content) that once submitted will be displayed on the page in a suitable format? I think Zope is capable of
this... is Python/anything required. Are there any examples I can look at?

I am in the process of reading the online Zope book - if anyone has any advice for reading material, I would be
grateful to hear it :-)

[Q] There are a lot of Zope products available - am I right in thinking that, say a 'Zope Discussion Board' product,
could be download and integrated into a Zope-powered web-site? i.e. Are Zope products 'plug and play' TM? ;-o

Thanks for the bandwidth,

Lee