[Zope] porting a brilliant cms to a superior platform

[Lennart Regebro]

From: "Myles Byrne" <myles@byrnewebservices.com>
> A big ask - and in the back of my mind I thought I'd have to start
> looking at commercial products - but then lo and behold I came across:
>
> eZpublish from eZ Systems (www.ez.no)
>
> It's absolutely brilliant, it handles article management with comments,
> forums, link management, photo gallerys, user management, caching etc.
> AND e-commerce (shopping carts, wishlists and ordering).

Out of interest: What is it you find so brilliant with it?

I logged in onto their demo site, and they don't support articles in any
kind of rich text format. I couldn't see any type of navigation support,
supposedly new articles just pop up under the category you entered with the
latest first or something. And I couldn't see any publishing workflow...
I didn't see a trace of the e-commerce support either. But I guess they just
didn't have that in the demo.

So what is it that is so brilliant? Granted, it's cheap, but otherwise it
seems to have the same features that thousants of php publishing hacks has.
So I seem to have missed out on something here.

> It written in PHP4 and runs on apache and mysql and the code looks
> pretty complicated (although I don't really know PHP that well).

PHP code has a tendency to become that.  :-)

> My question is:
>
> Whould anyone be interested in porting this system (or consolodating
> and pollishing existing zope products) to create a simliar zope
> solution?

Porting is really not feasible as such. That flat record based thinking that
PHP (and ASP) solutions are forced into does not make sense on a modern
object platform like Zope.

However, if you take Easy Publisher (http://easypublisher.torped.se/) you
have a content management system vastly superiour to ezPublish.
If you want discussions you can use ZUBB, I guess
(http://www.zope.org/Members/BwanaZulia/ZUBB). It's nothing special, but
neither is the forums in eZPublish. (There are better, free PHP forums on
the net).
For e-commerce support you have zCommerce
(http://www.zope.org/Members/ngarcia/zCommerce) I haven't used it and have
no clue if it's any good, but then again, I don't know if what ezPublish
e-commerce can do. :-)

So, you can quickly and easily consolidate something that kicks ezPublish's
ass yourself. :-)