[Zope] Content Management Solution

[Chris McDonough]

Hi Rajkumar,

Zope does not have a feature where you can "pull a lever" and produce a set
of static HTML files representing your site like some other content
management systems.  All content is generated dynamically.  However, many
people (including Zope Corp) have used Zope combined with Squid or other
HTTP cache servers to take most of the burden off Zope for most requests to
the website.  If it's performance you're worried about, caching is the
"biggest bang for the buck" solution.  It's not uncommon to be able to
service upwards of 95% of your web requests out of cache.

You can use Apache or another webserver to continue serving the static
portions of your site and move the functions performed by the static HTML
into Zope one at a time... you can also choose to import the entire site
into Zope and start serving it right away, but it's probably not worth it.
You want to make things better, not keep them the same, and serving static
HTML is not one of Zope's strong points.  I suggest gathering requirements
for what you want the system to do, then develop a few "test" pieces in Zope
to get a flavor for how it works; try to make these test pieces do something
that the existing "flatfile" site already does to see how Zope development
is different.

Zope supports XML templating via Zope Page Templates... there are also
addons available for XSLT (although I've never used them).

To manage Framemaker files in a Zope site, either use WebDAV, FTP, or a
shared directory served by LocalFS.

----- Original Message -----
From: Ganeshan, Rajkumar (IWMI-HQ)
To: 'zope@zope.org'
Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 8:54 AM
Subject: [Zope] Content Management Solution


Dear Zope Users, Developers and Zope Support,

Let me introduce myself first. I am Raj, webmaster for International
Water Management Institute (IWMI) . We are in the process of automating
our workflow and document flow for our website and intranet. The
solution is a Content management server. We are an International Scientific
Research Organization ( Non Governmental Org ) researching on Water
Management issues.  I have extensively studied a couple of content
management servers and at last shortlisted two. One is Zope and the other
one is
Interwoven's Teamsite. Interwoven's team site boasts of a hybrid system
that is both data-base driven and static document content. But as far
as I have studied if I am not mistaken Zope doesnt support a hybrid
solution. Its only database driven. We have already build the website up
and running ( www.iwmi.org) and in the process of building our intranet.
The website consists of about 6,000 to 7,000 html pages. So when it
comes to migration issues to Zope, does Zope support these static
documents as it is ? And does Zope support XML templating ? And does Zope
support file management concepts ? And can we use Zope with Adobe Framemaker
?
Other than these 4 issues I am completely satisfied with the product.
Please clarify as soon as possible.

Thanks with regards,

Raj
Webmaster, IWMI, Sri Lanka.