[Zope] PHP vs. Zope/Plone? Which better overall and for what?

[Phillip Hutchings]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 15:40:11 -0800, seberino at spawar.navy.mil
<seberino at spawar.navy.mil> wrote:
> I don't know much about web stuff.
>
> I can see amazing power in Zope and thought PHP was just
> for quick and easy little projects.
>
> However, I keep hearing about more and more big beefy
> web projects and companies using PHP.
>
> Without starting a flame war, is there a chance in future
> the power AND ease of PHP may win out over Zope?  Does
> Zope's architecture have some killer features that PHP
> can never copy?
>
> It seems Zope's steep learning curve is a showstopper for some.
>
> Please advise.
>
> Chris

As a professional PHP developer you'd think I'd choose PHP, but no.
I'd go for Zope for anything complex. Why? I'll explain ;)

For quick-and-dirty database to webpage things, PHP wins out every
time. Anything that involves basic processing work I'd go to PHP as
well. But for anything complex, or if I'm starting from scratch
data-storage-wise I'd choose Zope.

Basically, despite all PHP's libraries, you start from scratch with
PHP. If you want to present friendly URLs to fetch objects (which in
PHP would then grab stuff from the DB) like
/staff/managerial/joe_bloggs you'd need to either create a whole
directory structure for each person, or you'd need to use mod_rewrite
to a script and process it with PHP to get what you need, then you'd
have to fetch the data and display it.

In Zope you create the object in the right place, and you're done! You
could create a 'StaffMember' product and define the behaviour and data
there and it'd be stored, right there, in Zope. If you need to search,
use a ZCatalog. SQL is handy though, and ZSQL can be used for that,
but in a similar way.

I've only just started on Zope development, but in PHP you always seem
to be reinventing the wheel, so to speak. I've made several backends
for my website, and none have been finished. Though my current Zope
site isn't finished, it's mostly working, and with nowhere near the
effort of the PHP sites. I'm sold :)

--
Phillip Hutchings
http://www.sitharus.com/
sitharus at gmail.com / sitharus at sitharus.com