[Zope] Can Zope Handle This Site ?

[Paul Winkler]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 11:32:07PM +0200, Toon Moene wrote:
> Paul Winkler wrote:
> 
> > With that kind of traffic, I assume you have some money to spend.
> 
> Ah, mistake number one (from my side).
> 
> My employer is a (Dutch) government agency.  Any traffic on our site is 
> supposed to be paid for already in taxes - so the expense on 
> constructing the site should be minimized :-)

Understood.
Well, you can definitely do it yourself ... but I don't recommend
doing your first zope job in a hurry on a big site. I get to
spend the next 3 weeks rebuilding one of those from scratch. It
was "ported" from another app. server and the team that did it 
had a tight deadline and had never done *anything* in zope before.
It's huge, and it's a godawful mess. You don't want to build
one of those.

Zope is very powerful, but there are important things that 
aren't obvious (like acquisition), and you can really make a 
mess of things by trying to apply inappropriate paradigms.
It helps to have a good grasp on object-oriented design,
and focus on those aspects of zope rather than just "how do I..."

If you can't afford experienced help, you should plan to take 
your time and work your way up the learning curve.  Remember 
Brooks' law: "Plan to throw one away, because you will anyway."
Build some little things in zope, try out ideas, read the
Zope Book at least (and probably everything else you can
get your hands on), build some more things, try some weird
ideas just to see what happens, read *everything* on the mailing 
list and look up stuff you don't understand ...  You'll get 
the hang of it.  In a few weeks or months (depending how much 
time you devote to this) you'll be ready to build a major zope site.

If that's too slow, or your boss doesn't think you can spare the
"nonproductive" time, you should really really get some outside help, at
least to plan your implementation. That could speed you up a lot.
--

Paul Winkler
"Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is made - today!"