[Zope] Seeking advice on Zope implementation

[pythonic]

I have searched on this topic a bit but then could not find what I am looking
for so posting my Zope questions here.

Scenario: We have decided to use Zope as the web frontend to our python based
application. So this will be implemented as Zope product. We have
already started
reading the docs available on zope.org. So far we have decided to use
zope behind
apache+fastcgi server to take advantage of apache rewrite engine and
to serve static
content.

Questions:
1. Startup custmization: How can one configure zope to load instance
of this as product
(my application) on the startup but not the ZMI and other zope stuff.
2. We want to generate xml using ZPTs and then apply xsl. Is the server side
transformation supported?
3. Is there any good doc available that describes how to do things you do in
ZMI programmatically?
4. Zope 2.7 / 3 ?

Any pointers/suggestions? If you know any links that addresses above
topics please
let me know.

TIA.