[Zope] Is Zope a good tool for this application?

[Paul Winkler]

On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 11:29:23AM -0700, Mark Randall wrote:
> [I apologize if this is a repost. I tried once and it didn't seem to work]
> 
> I'm new to the list and hope this is an appropriate place to post 
> a basic question. Our business has a need to prototype a portal 
> application. A friend mentioned that Zope might be worth 
> investigating as a possible platform. I'm hoping that the readers of 
> this list can offer some guidance.
> 
> OVERVIEW
> This portal will be a public media sharing site, not too dissimilar 
> from the old MP3.com site (or kind of like the current garageband.com 
> site). Public users need to be able to create an account. Each user 
> with an account will get an automatically created, somewhat 
> customizable 'homepage' within the site. They will be able to self-
> publish their media, add it to one of the site's directory categories 
> for browsing, and add a searchable description. Each homepage will 
> have a list of that user's media that other users can browse/play, a 
> description of the user, a mini-blog for the user (with comments). 

So far you have described a typical site built with CMF or
one of the higher-level frameworks that build on it: Plone or CPS.

> Each piece of media will have a way for other users to rate it (the 
> average rating being displayed), report it for abuse, and add 
> a 'review' to it. Reviews will have a "Was this review helpful" 
> option (like Amazon).

You'd do this with a custom content type. For Plone I'd suggest
trying Archetypes;  CPS has a similar schema-based approach.

> The main page of the site will have a browsable category directory, 
> search function, as well as an automatically generated "top ten" 
> list, a "most recently added" list, a "higest rated" list, "featured" 
> list etc. Each category will have its own sub-page with the same 
> items on it.

ZCatalog is a natural for these jobs. (One nice thing about CMF and 
derived products is that re-cataloging happens automatically
on every add, edit, or delete.)
 
> This site will start as a low volume prototype (a few hundred users) 
> but we hope it will need to eventually scale to tens of thousands.

Read Chris M's "Scaling Zope" presentation on plope.com.
Zope has handled some extremely high-volume sites.
It takes some hardware, but hardware is relatively cheap.
Basically the strategy is:

- use load testing tools to find performance baselines
  and set targets

- use very aggressive caching for static content

- use ZEO to transparently add more hardware

- use profiling tools to find bottlenecks,
  then cache and/or optimize them


> - Is Zope a good platform for this type of application?
> - Are there any sites like this built on Zope?
> - How far can Zope (and existing Zope addons) get us toward this 
> goal? (halfway? more?)
> - Are there any Zope addons that we should particularly look at?

Probably, but I haven't done anything quite like this.
Check the plone-users list, I believe people have discussed simlar
apps recently.

> - Any caveats or concerns we should be aware of?

You will encounter plenty of questions and stumbling blocks on 
the way, there is a lot to learn - but the mailing lists are very 
helpful and IMHO it's a very good solution to the problem space.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com