[Zope] Re: Advice needed before settling on Zope

[Rainsford, David]

I never said thanks to all you guys for your advice - it all came in
very useful.  In the end though, I have decided to go with another
system, Knowledge Tree.  The reason is that a) it's written in PHP, and
all of us developers are fluent in PHP whereas there is going to be a
learning curve with Python, and Zope.  Secondly, it already provides 95%
of what we need, much more than Zope, Plone and other Zope based
management systems.  I think building from scratch on top of Zope would
have been too hard for us considering that our clients, whilst they
haven't given us a specific timeframe, want the software up and running
as soon as possible, and also we are juggling quite a few projects at
the same time and to do it justice I think we would really have to
immerse ourselves in Zope for a week or two which we don't have time to
do.

But thanks again, not just Maik but everyone who replied to my question.

-----Original Message-----
From: zope-bounces at zope.org [mailto:zope-bounces at zope.org] On Behalf Of
Maik Ihde
Sent: Wednesday, 15 February 2006 19:20
To: zope at zope.org
Subject: [Zope] Re: Advice needed before settling on Zope

Hi David,

> 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.

As you might already know, there are quite a few CMS built on top of
Zope2.
Zope3 seems to be getting more and more momentum as people find out that
it's concepts and ideas are really superior.

> Version Control: we need quite complex version control.  Lets say we 
> have
document x.  This document will be developed and worked on by multiple
users. 
At the same time, this will also be translated into other languages.  If
a change is made to the English version, then that change will have to
be made in other languages too.  I think that in Version Control speak,
the different languages can be thought of as different renditions.

Version control is already used in various Zope-Products (CPS for
example). So you need to keep track on multilingual Content here. The
translations are to be done by human beings, though? Do you just want to
create a new version in a certain workflow-state for the other
language-versions when a new english version occurs?

> Workflow Control: because of the number of people involved, we need to

> have a

Well, Workflows are there. In Zope2 Land You have DCWorkflow, some
OpenFlow Variant and also AlphaFlow on the Plone Side. In Zope3 there is
also a Workflow Package, so I think the Infrastructure is there too.

> Document Management - the system is all about documents.  They would 
> like the
ability to organise the documents into different pages for people to
download. 
They should be able to download older versions or different renditions.
Also each document will be available only to certain groups or roles.

No Problems here as well, especially the security model of both Zope2
and Zope3 is really well suited for such Applications.

> 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.

Then definetely you are right in betting on Zope. I would even say, that
it sounds like you should choose Zope3 - however this is hard to say,
since your requirements are not very specific. But if customisation and
extensibility are important then it sounds like Zope3 to me.

>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.).

Yes, but Zope2 is a complex Beast which has to carry a lot of historical
weirdnesses around. Zope3 has a much better structure but there are not
so many Addons available yet. 

I would advise that you have a look at the zope3 Malinglist and try to
find out if the already existing Component Infrastructure roughly suits
your needs. I mean Database Connectivity, LDAP and that stuff. 

Kind Regards
Maik


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