Can zope do this?

[kosh]

FunkyTritone wrote:

First of all a good way to get lots of questions answered is to logon to 
irc.openprojects.net with an irc client and join #zope Sometimes of the day 
it seems dead but that is because people are often coding instead of 
talking on the channel. However most of the time you can get someone's help 
if you are willing to ask a question then idle on the channel for about 10 
minutes.

> Sorry if this is off topic, I couldn't find a zope specific ng.
> 
> I'm learning Zope these days, and I'd like to put up a server with
> it, but before I invest time and money I'd like to know if Zope
> is the correct tool for what I'm trying to do:
> I'm trying to semplify the creation of "standard" company sites.
> With standard I mean the they need a subset of the usual services
> (news, catalogs, user registration). The PHP + MySQL solution works
> fine but it takes too much time to build everthing. And using
> Zope I could use their wonderful admin as back office.
> So I'd like to create with zope these services (catalog, ...),
> and somehow create the new site putting all these pieces together,
> and giving the site administrator (the one who controls the site
> contents) some specific access (to insert new products, etc..) to the zope
> admin.

Yes that can be done. Actually myself and many other zope developers do 
this very commonly. One thing I highly recommend is learning python. With 
knowledge of python you can fully use the power of zope and enable some of 
its more complex but very powerful features. Writing custom products the 
encompass a piece of logic is very useful. So once you figure out what you 
want your catalog to be you write it as a custom object that later you can 
just add like a lego piece. I find overall this saves vast amounts of time 
while building websites. It takes a little bit more time up front to create 
these items but overall I find we earn the time back after using the 
product twice.

> 
> Can it be done? Is a good idea giving the site admin some access to
> the zope admin? Or should I build some back office interface from
> scratch? (I'd love to use Zope's admin, it's just wonderful)
>

You can give the admin as much or as little access as you want. Zope has a 
full access control list system that applies to every object. What is very 
sweet is that these access control lists can apply all the way down to the 
methods of a class so that you can define who can execute which method of 
your class. I find this to be a very nice feature.
 
> How many sites do you think I could serve from such a Zope server
> (usually small sites, few megs of data, around 1000 hits a day)?
> 
That would depend on how powerful the server is. Asking this question on 
the zope irc channel is likely to get you some pretty good answers.

> Any answers will be really appreciated!
> 
> Thanks :-)
> 
> Giovanni