Nature of Zope...

[Scott]

Greetings everyone,

I have a couple general questions regarding the nature of Zope?

Also, please forgive me if this is not the proper forum for this type
of question.  If so, please disregard.

I'm interested in developing business apps, not just developing a
content management site.  I'm wondering if Zope is right for me.  My
programming exposure has been limited to simple PHP and not even from
an OOP perspective, just simply dropping logic into HTML pages


I'm interested in building deployable apps with administration built
into the app itself, not necessarily being administered from within
Zope.  For example, I would create an app with its own administrator,
its own staff, and its own technicians.  These being completely
separate from the Zope management console.  (The users and managers of
this app would be completely unaware of Zope).

These users would have certain tasks that they can do based on of
course their ownership and security levels (these also being managed
by the apps administrator and perspective).  Can these things be
controlled outside of Zope?  If I did that would it break the core
"point" of Zope?  Can and should I create a means to tie into the
ZopeDB from within the app for users and perms or can I store this in
a SQL database.  If I create a deployable package and distribute it,
let it run, and simply restore my MySQL database in the event of a
failure and redeploy my original "Zope Project" after a
re-installation, could I be good to go?  Or must I store users,
groups, perms, etc in the ZopeDB, or can I put users and their
permissions in a SQL DB?

If Zope is well suited to do this, what is the next step?  I've
installed and ran through the tutorial, but It doesn't get into the
nitty gritty, I have no Python experience and no OOP experience.

I plan on designing apps that have a lot of logic tied into it?  I
have no idea where I can find out how to do certain things, for
example, making database modifications based on certain criteria that
a user does in the app, modifying the DB schema, creating the actual
HTML forms based on SQL data, dropping in the logic behind the scenes.
 The best way I've learned in the past is with tutorials, which
explain things step by step and why.

In order to use Zope, is it mandatory to know Python and OOP to build
complex apps.  The reason for me wanting to use Zope is so I wouldn't
have to learn another language, so that development could go fast, so
that a person without extensive programming experience could build a
logical business application.

If it helps, the three apps I'm working on are:

One, an asset management database, with admins making schema changes,
and assigning groups and users to modify add certain pieces.

And two others, one a change management system and the other a trouble
ticket system, once again admins creating and managing users (staff
and tech), staff members creating and managing tickets and assigning
them to techs, and techs managing their assigned tickets.  Everything
is queue based with ownership.

Thanks so much for your help and time