[Zope] Wrapping a non-Zope site in Zope

Tue Mar 9 00:48:52 EST 2004

Hi there,

What is the best way to "wrap" another live site in a Zope page or serve it 
through Zope.

I have a web-enabled mail site that I must plug into a client's Plone 
site.  The client wants his employees to first log into their Plone portal 
before being able to log into their web enabled mail site.  He might also 
want all of this to happen behind https in the end.  So an employee will 
have to do two logins to get to his/her mail.

The second phase will incorporate the mail site into the Plone skin, by 
stripping the <head> section from the mail server served pages and then 
plugging the body into the body slot of the Plone skin.

My idea was for Zope to "pass on" the mail server served pages, somewhat 
like a reverse proxy.  Maybe a reverse proxy is the answer, but how do I 
get the client to first log into the Plone portal before being able to log 
into the mail page.  I have started writing a "proxy" object in Zope that 
takes the browser request, figures out which page to retrieve from the mail 
server with urllib, retrieve the page, and pass that back again, but it is 
a bit slow.  It also leaves me with nasty work to do such as searching for 
urls on the mail server created pages and changing them to my "zope urls".

In the end only one server serving on one port must be open to the internet.

Any suggestions?

Etienne