[Zope] Advice needed before settling on Zope

[Andrew Milton]

+-------[ Rainsford, David ]----------------------
| Hi Zope users!
| 
| We have to build a content/document management system for our company, and I
| have been assigned to look into this and make a start.  The system has quite a
| few requirements, which I'll outline below.

[snip]

| Our client is quite specific about what they require and how they want it to be
| presented, so ease of customisation and extensibility is a major factor.  We
| have looked around at existing CMSes but have not found one that fulfills all
| of our requirements or that is customisable enough that we can fulfill our
| requirements with a bit of work.  We looked at Plone, and then I decided we
| might be better off going down a level and building on Zope.
| 
| Does this sound like a good idea to you guys? 

There's nothing that you've outlined that can't be done in Zope, in fact CA
were developing (or have developed) a document management system in Zope (well
in Plone) that they are intending to contribute back to the Zope community.
The project is called BrightStor. You might want to poke the CA guys in
Melbourne to see if they can give you a timeframe for when the rights will be
assigned to the Plone Foundation (the Plone guys might also know d8)

| Do you know of any better suited
| frameworks or even existing systems that we should use?  Finally if we do
| settle on Zope, would we be wiser using the 2.x version or the 3.x version?  I
| imagine that 2.x has more documentation and more addons (e.g. for versioning,
| workflow etc.).

At this point you'd probably find more resources that you could adapt for
Zope2 as opposed to Zope3. If you're going to develop from the ground up,
Zope2 + Five (Zope3 interface layer for Zope2) might help you get started,
with an easier transition to Zope3 if/when it's more mature for you.

| Another consideration is that the skillset here is mainly in PHP and Java,
| however I don't think anybody is fazed by having to use Python if Zope is the
| best option for us.

We're all biased on this list, you probably won't find too many people who
won't tell you to use Zope d8)

-- 
Andrew Milton
akm at theinternet.com.au