[Zope] ColdFusion - I want to remain a Zopista, please help

[Bob Campbell]

We recently switched from ColdFusion to Zope. Both products had to be usable
not only by IT people, but by technically literate business users. This is a
business perspective with a technical bent...-:)

Here are some of the pros and cons of each...
ColdFusion
Pros
   Documentation
  Query Building
  IDE (Nick Bradbury's Homesite>>>ColdFusion Studio) and
ColdFusion-Dreamweaver roundtrip
  Training availability
  History

Cons
 ColdFusion Application Server is good, not great, requires another server
and more then average monitoring.
 Productivity. Despite 1000's of custom tags, ColdFusion requires excessive
coding to build basic data driven sites
   (One example would be the Fusbox calendar example. It consists of 5 pages
of code, much of it complex and requires       reworking if one wants to use
it elsewhere for a different purpose within the same site. Offers less
functionality then either the Calendar Tag or the Event Calendar.)
Language: If you want custom programming, you will need MSVC++

Zope
Pros
  Data driven from the get go.
 Can be used (on an Intranet) without IIs or Apache. (Some have said that
Apache is faster. So far, in our use, which is real world as opposed to
benchmarks, the difference is neglible and Zope is just as fast as the
ColdFusion/Apache setup.)

  Productivity. No other tool on the market, commercial or open source, can
compare with Zope...when it comes to building a  functional data driven web
site that can be maintained by technically literate users with a minimum
knowledge of html and web technologies. (The above statement needs to read
carefully. I base the statement on tests performed with a handful of  users
with absolutely no web experience.)
Products: Products such as Squishdot are invaluable in corporate Intranet.
The abililty to resuse the same product within the same site.. over and over
again cannot be underestimated.

 Community: this list provides better support at no cost, then most
commercial companies who charge outrageous fees. (One 12 minute call to MS
about Exchange server cost $265 bucks)
 Community contributions and DC contributions to the source and bug fixes
are quicker and in some ways, superior to the equivalent fixes provided by
the majority of commercial software companies. (That includes Allarie and
Macromedia)

Security: Excellent out of the box security.
Language. Python. It is a truly beautiful language, well documented, and
training is readily available. In the hands of good programmer, there is no
telling what could be developed with Python/Zope. Note: during our research,
there were Python programmers who felt Zope was bad for Python and Zopista's
who felt Python was bad for Zope. Go figure.

Ease of use (don't laugh). Basic site building with Zope is extremely easy.
Aquistion. It works, just don't ask me to explain it.

Cons
Documentation: Getting better but you won't find the 4 book documentation
you get with ColdFusion
Not enough benchmarks or test stats. (If you research a lot of products or
Zope literature, you can start to get a little jumpy after reading "not for
production, developement only, beta beta beta...this has an extremely
negative effect on management)

Ease of use [expletive deleted] Go above the basics and the learning curve
is somewhat steep...

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If your graphics people are just doing graphics and not doing
graphics/datadriven stuff ala Ultradev, then they can still use DW to design
although they will not be able to the roundtrip stuff.