Zope and PHP Nuke

[David Brown]

I have been looking around some websites, and have come across Zope and PHP
Nuke.  As far as I can see, both systems provide a basis for a complex
website including discussion forums and the like.  Would it be fair to say
they cover similar uses, or are there major differences?  My impression is
that Zope is more demanding on the system, and on configuration and
maintainance, but has better facilities for letting people remotely add
articles to the site.  I know that Zope is Python-based, while PHP Nuke is
(oddly enough) PHP-based, and I am at least basically familiar with both
languages.

What I am interested in doing is setting up a relatively simple discussion
forum system for our company.  The aim is mainly to provide a common point
were we can hold information and comments regarding changes, bugs, or ideas
for our products.  Initially, this is only for internal use, but later it
should be accessible externally too.  There will not be any really sensitive
data on the site, so we don't need high security (other than the firewall
and filtering for the web server itself), but we need at least to be able to
restrict access to areas based on user names and passwords.  As far as I
undertand it, both Zope and PHP Nuke would be suitable for this.

It is important that the system can run on both Linux and NT - we currently
run a small Apache + PHP system on NT at the moment, but will later move to
Linux.  How easy is it to migrate data from one system to the other when we
switch over?

For the backend, am I correct in thinking that both systems support MySQL
and postgreSQL ?  Is there any particular reason for choosing one over the
other here?  (Speed is not vital as this will be a low load, and I think
MySQL's more limited data integrity protection will be perfectly
sufficient.)  Are there binaries for postgreSQL available for NT anywhere?

Do Zope and PHP Nuke support different languages for different users?
English is fine for me, but many people here (in Norway) would prefer the
texts to be in Norwegian, even if the posts themselves are in English.

There are plenty of sites describing Zope and PHP Nuke, and I have read some
of the introductionary stuff.  But there doesn't seem to be much comparing
the two, which would be helpful for people like me who are trying to choose.
Any comments or links would be very useful, as would suggestions for
alternative systems.

Thanks,

David Brown
Norway