[Zope] Zope 2.4.0 bugs and comments

[Gold is Heavy]

I was trying to decide the best place to report bugs and comments, and this 
looks like the best place to me.  I didn't get inspired by the bug collector 
running on an old site.  Maybe I've made the wrong choice, and if so please 
email me!

**If you post a followup, please CC me, as I am not subscribed to the list.**

First, I kept hearing all kinds of buzz about Zope, but I didn't really know 
why should I use Zope.  There is no documentation with a clear and short 
reason why.  Like, you can do this in Zope, but try this on <blah>.  Or you 
can do this in 2 minutes in Zope, but how long does it take you on <blah>?  
Plus a short statement of what Zope is (and web services development 
framework is too fuzzy for me).

So I decided to get this thing and see for myself.  I must say, I AM 
IMPRESSED!  Now that I see what it is, there is a lot to like.

But I was also disappointed by one really obvious bug, that should not have 
remained for longer than a day.

1.
When you try to logout, it just doesn't work!  Here is what happens, and I 
tried this on IE 5.0, Mozilla Build 2001072408, Konqueror 2.1.1, so I don't 
think it's browser or OS dependent.  When I select 'logout', it immediately 
prompts me with an authentication screen!  Shocking.  Ok, if I just click 
cancel or authenticate myself correctly, I REMAIN LOGGED IN, and nothing 
happens.  However, if I type in bogus username and password, click OK, then 
when the stupid authentication window comes up again, hit CANCEL, I am logged 
out.  However, "Logged in as <username>" still remains displayed, as If I am 
logged in.

Here is what should happen: when I select 'logout' it should log me out 
immediately, and NOT ask me for authentication at all.  It should further 
hide everything that was on my screen, and instead of saying "Logged in as 
blah" It should say, "Not logged in!"

2.
When I took ownership of a folder, I was no longer able to relinquish 
ownership back to the way it was: unowned.  I think I should be able to do 
that if I have the "Manager" role.  This is pretty minor I guess.

3.
When doing the Tutorial (it's a great Tutorial BTW!!  Kudos!) I noticed that 
a few times Zope failed to render the page correctly and displayed chunks of 
ASCII from the dtml page, below the ZOPE logo.  I have a feeling it might be 
connected to having or not having a newline character as the last character 
in the dtml file.

4.
I've seen much really weird behavior from Zope that I can't reproduce.  I've 
seen things like utterly garbled screen after installing latest Hotfix 8/4.  
I've seen Zope get really confused about my "login" status sometimes and 
display some folders with "index_html" as if I merely wanted to look at them 
instead of manage/edit them.  I had to play some tricks with the login 
process to get it to recognize that, indeed I am logged in, and please, show 
me the contents of the folders instead of rendering 'index_html' for me.  And 
there were more things that I just can't remember.  The general feeling I had 
was that it was flaky and fragile and that I had to avoid doing certain 
things to stop it from breaking.

5.
The link to latest 8/4 Hotfix on the zope.org is broken.  I had to get the 
correct link from the mailing list archives.

I am using Zope 2.4.0 with Python 2.1.1 on GNU/Linux (Libranet distro, based 
on Debian potato) and on Solaris 8.  The same weirdness is observed 
regardless.

I think overall that Zope is one of the coolest things I've seen for the web 
development, but it really could use some polish.

I also have one question: is it possible to use Zope in a multi-user 
environment where each user can have their own virtual Zope domain, located 
in their own account on a unix box?  What I mean is the usual setup by web 
hosting providers where they create 'public_html' for each account, and each 
person can manage their own web site separately.  I know zope can allow this 
through the browser, but is it possible to achieve more separation and more 
virtualization, so that each user can appear to me the manager of / (root 
folder), and so that each users Zope development files and DBs could be 
located on their own respective accounts?  I would be interested to know the 
answer to this.

Thanks for making Zope :).