[Zope] why shall I use Zope?

[Mike Renfro]

On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 05:21:44PM +0800, Newbie wrote:

> can someone give me some ideas on what Zope can be useful for small
> scale website?  I understand zope as a good platform to build web
> application (medium to large scale) and portal solution.  But if I
> have only 20 pages of websites and news I probably update only once
> a week, is Zope still useful?

Possibly not, at least many of the overpowering advantages I've seen
wouldn't be as noticable at the 20-static-page level. However, even at
that level, the easy ability to keep standard headers, footers, and
styles across your pages without having to think about it (via
standard_html_header and standard_html_footer) is nice.

> To use Zope, I still need to understand HTML if I create the content
> using DTML document.

Yes, but you also have the option of Zope Page Templates, which
designers can write with WYSIWYG editors, upload via WebDAV or FTP,
and then have a programmer work in all the dynamic bits. I suppose you
could even use someone's custom content object (HTMLDocument,
perhaps?) and write generic HTML with no extra stuff at all.

> There are a lot of website builder such as Frontpage.  With
> frontpage, one can manage his/her website locally, update it and
> synchronize the contentt with the server.

If you require Frontpage-style synchronization, you're probably stuck
with Frontpage. If all you need is some sort of local editor that can
upload pages after you're done, then Dreamweaver, Mozilla Composer,
and probably several other tools (maybe even Frontpage in FTP mode)
could be used with Zope.

-- 
Mike Renfro  / R&D Engineer, Center for Manufacturing Research,
931 372-3601 / Tennessee Technological University -- renfro@tntech.edu