[Zope] Zope or Plone for a social-networking site?

[Dave Kuhlman]

>    Hi everybody,
>    I was thinking about trying to develop a social-networking site, like
>    myspace.com or facebook.com (well, on a much smaller scale of course).
>    Elements I'd like to make available for the users are:
>    - profile with photo gallery
>    - blog
>    - instant messages to other online users
>    - chat functionality
>    - forum/discussion boards
>    - "internal" mail system
>    - ... (should be extensible)
>    After looking for information for quite some time, I am still not
>    quite sure what to do:
>    1) Do you think Zope/Plone would be the right thing for this kind of
>    project, or rather some Java CM-system (with better performance maybe
>    since it is compiled and not interpreted?) or some PHP-system? (not a
>    fan of PHP, to be honest... I favor python)
>    2) Now, the main question: Zope or Plone? I don't completely
>    understand the difference between these two...
>    I would really appreciat e some help/other opinions on this matter.
>    Thanks a lot, Martin

Think of Plone as extended Zope.  Plone is Zope plus many of the
capabilities that you are asking for above.  Plone is built on top
of Zope.  Plone is Zope plus added value.

Also take a look at CPS (http://www.cps-project.org/).  It, like
Plone, is built on top of Zope and is Zope plus added capabilities
like Blog, Wiki, Forum, Chat, ...  CPS provides a WYSIWYG editor
that enables you to customize the look and layout of the pages of
your portal.

And, compare with Silva (http://www.infrae.com/products/silva).

You may also want to look at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/, where you
can do feature comparison charts on CMSs (content management
systems).  CPS is listed under Nuxeo, the company that supports it.

Dave

-- 
Dave Kuhlman
http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman