[Zope] Advice needed before settling on Zope

[bruno desthuilliers]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> On 2/15/06, Rainsford, David <rainsford at acer.edu.au> wrote:
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> Have you looked at CPS? It seems to fulfill most of your requirements
> out of the box.

I can confirm this - In fact, I was about to post about it !-)

Now for the downside:
- CPS is a complex beast built on top of CMF, which is a complex beast
built on top of Zope2 which is itself already quite complex.
- Zope2's documentation is in a very sorry state (lot of outdated stuff,
sometime contracting each others, and lot of undocumented or
underdocumented features and gotchas).
- It's even worse for CPS and CMF since they have almost no usable
documentation. Due to the hi abstraction level of these frameworks, even
using-the-code-luke can become a kind of nightmare.

Learning Python is surely not a problem. Any decent programmer should be
able to productive with Python in less than 2 weeks. The problem is
learning Zope2, then learning CMF and CPS. And this is really another story.

Not to say you shouldn't use Zope or CPS - they are both great pieces of
software and you should definitely take time to evaluate CPS as a
possible solution.

Now would you choose to stick to 'barebone' Zope, and since you're fresh
to Zope, I'd say that Zope3 might be a far better option than Zope2. And
 AFAICT, Zope3 seems to be better documented than Zope2.

My 2 cents...
-- 
bruno desthuilliers
développeur
bruno at modulix.org
http://www.modulix.com