[Zope] General Best Practices Setup

[Michael Havard]

I'm looking for some observations on a best practices for setting up ZOPE, 
which products to use and how to use them. We've been using ZOPE/CMF for 
about a year now and it's great but we have run into a few problems which I 
think are setup issues and so we are looking at the architecture again.

The architecture I'm thinking of going with right now is:

Apache (rewrite rule) -----> ZEO Client -----> ZEO Storage Server (using 
ZODB)

I think Plone/CMF is definitely in as well as Archetypes, External Editor, 
BTreeFolder2, DCWorkflow, and EPOZ.

We need a DEV and QA area on separate machines from the Production instances 
but an easy means of migrating templates, python, and infrastructure code 
from one stage to the next. In the past we've used ZSyncer with decent 
success. But is there a better way, maybe using something via CVS or some 
other product I'm not familiar with just yet?

We have about 3000+ documents (policies, procedures, how-tos, bulletins), 
daily updates by the content managers (time sensitive information), and 
probably about 19gb of bandwidth a month consumed (2 million hits a month) 
with those documents served from the old IIS server. We've previously used 
DCOracle2 and DCOracleStorage to house field level content and may continue 
down that path for some simple feeds using ZSQL, but I think the majority 
will remain in the ZODB. Keeping it all in Oracle seemed too problematic 
with our setup. We continually have problems packing because of allocation 
of rollback segments and the database bloating exponentially (300 meg of 
uploaded code somehow consumed 1.8gb or Oracle table space).

My main concern is that the system needs to be responsive. So if using 
another storage mechanism gains 500ms or more per transaction I'd be willing 
to look into it. But it also needs to be fairly easy to maintain because 
we're working with EDS.

Our content developers have typically used Frontpage but are NOT good at 
creating HTML documents, script, CSS or anything that would be considered 
"CODE". Essentially they use Frontpage like you'd use Word or Powerpoint. So 
we'd like to have as many tools as possible to ease their content creation 
and formatting efforts. I'd thought about teaching them structured text 
and/or using EPOZ. But our goal is really to keep the content being entered 
as clean as possible from ye ol' legacy code (font, b, small, i, and such) 
and to take advantage of some existing CSS files that are shared between 
many of our sites/systems.

Does anyone have any success stories, documentation, suggestions, or even 
failures so that I don't go down the wrong path.

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