[Zope] What product to choose?

Karlo Lozovina karlo at mosor.net
Sat Jan 21 15:31:20 EST 2006


First of all, greetings to everyone :)!

I have been given a task to choose appropriate software for developing
two projects, that is - web pages. I'm quite familiar with many
software products available out there, but I don't have the time to
thoroughly test each one and then decide which one to use. So, this is
the place where you guys come in - I will briefly as possible describe
specifications of both projects and I would like to hear from you what
would be the best platform to implement both projects.

First one is something like a mathematical encyclopedia and online
collaboration tool - mix between MathWorld
(http://mathworld.wolfram.com/) and a Wiki of some kind
(http://www.wikipedia.org).

The most important feature is this: users must be able to edit
documents using syntax similar to LaTeX (no WYSIWYG-like editor),
because after all web will contain a lot's of math formulas and
expressions, and most of the users are already accustomed with
(La)TeX. There is a similar implementation in LatexWiki
(http://mcelrath.org/Notes/LatexWiki), addon for ZWiki, which is Zope 2
based, but I haven't tested that one out so I can't really say is that
exactly what I need.

Second most important feature is that of interconnections of articles -
for example: when I define and write let's say Pitagora's theorem, I
want to be able to "include" (much like C's #include <>, and Python's
import something) into other documents. This way all the material can
be defined in central repository and broken into small pieces
(theorems, proofs, tasks...) and then reorganized as needed.

Second web is much less complicated - it's intended to be a mix between
news portal and searchable database of medical and similar products.

Currently, I'm reviewing few options for implementing those two
projects - plain Zope 2 or a Zope 2 based CMS (Plone, ZWiki, etc). If
there is a Zope 2 based CMS that satisfies most of my requirements, I
wouldn't mind using that. But, since Zope 2 will be someday replaced by
Zope 3, I'm not that happy to use an already outdated product. That
brings me to my next question - would it be smart to try to develop
this using Zope 3? Is it mature and production ready enough?
There is a third possibility, try to do it from scratch using Python
(since that is the only language I'm good in that is suited for web
development), but that seems like to big hassle.

I'm mostly biased forwards Zope 3, since it's quite a new product with
(I hope :>) bright future - i'm just not sure someone with zero Zope
knowledge (although, I know Python quite well) can develop both
projects in under a half a year.

There, that's all I can think of now, any thoughts, ideas, URL's are
very much appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

-- 
Karlo Lozovina - Mosor



More information about the Zope mailing list