newbie: Zope

[Martijn Faassen]

Nick Trout <nick at nil_spam_videosystem.co.uk> wrote:
[snip]
> To be honest I'm tempted to go away and try WebWare and even Medusa and come
> back to Zope if and when it becomes more usable.

> I need a quick easy solution for an intranet. I can see the benefits of Zope
> and I like where its going, but for me it not there yet! The intranet is a
> simple side project of mine and I cant afford the time really.

Zope *can* be complicated, but as far as I know, WebWare, Quixote, and 
definitely Medusa currently require *more* work to set up and make
them do something. They're programmer oriented, and often in a simple
intranet you want to use simple HTML without programmers being involved.
Zope does that just fine. DTML can be awful, but there's a decent subset
of it that isn't that terrible.

Zope can be daunting because it introduces what are for most people
new concepts in quite a large amount. Some of the concepts that it
introduces (such as acquisition) are probably new for *all* people.
But I think you're overstating the problems with Zope here; for simple
HTML work it can be used by non programmers just fine, for instance.
It's also easy to hook up a relational database to the web, while just
using some DTML and possibly some Python glue.

Anyway, if you are looking for a quick easy solution, Zope can be quite
useful. Just ignore all the complicated stuff and use a bit of DTML and
ZSQL methods, for instance. Use ready-made components such as Squishdot.
Zope is powerful and flexible however, which makes it more complex than is 
necessary for something *really* simple.

Something *really* simple would be HTML files in a Apache directory, 
for instance, with possibly some Python CGI thrown in. Though even in
this case, setting up Apache properly can take some time and puzzlement.
And of course you can make Python CGI scripts as complex as you like. :)

Regards,

Martijn
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