[Web-SIG] Re: Just lost another one to Rails

[Martijn Faassen]

Ian Bicking wrote:
[snip]
> FWIW, I strongly suggested to Adrian that he call his project a CMS, not 
> a web framework.  Sure, it is also a web framework, but who cares about 
> another one of those?  It's interesting because it's a CMS, and it fills 
>  a niche that isn't well filled right now. 

Could you identify this niche a bit more clearly? There is one huge 
Python-based CMS called Plone (which in my experience enjoys much the 
same type of buzz as Ruby on Rails does), and there are others such as 
Silva (which I've helped build) and CPS. To my eyes this niche is very 
well filled. Is the difference that all these efforts are Zope based? Is 
the niche a non-Zope-based Python-based CMS?

CMSes are somewhat interesting as they're applications and frameworks at 
the same time. That is, they provide a very visible end-user user 
interface, but for every deployment they also need integration, 
customization and so on. Zope, for all its flaws, has a now fairly-well 
understood (by Zope developers) infrastructure to do this kind of stuff.

Because Zope and Zope-based CMSes have an explicit user interface they 
also tend to attract users that are not Python developers but do want to 
do tasks like create new forms, new types of content objects, and the 
like, and sysadmins that do not know Python that need to keep the whole 
system running and well-configured.

I haven't seen Andrew Kuchling explain what he meant by his implication 
that Zope (3) should not be using Python, but I think it indicates that 
there is significantly different perspective involved here. With all the 
focus on extensible CMSes, Zope developers are perhaps more used to 
applications that are also frameworks and that expose traditionally 
development-level functionality to non-developers than most other people 
who build Python-based web applications, and therefore the 
customizability requirements may be vastly different.

It seems therefore to me that a dialog between Zope and the rest of the 
Python world might be very useful. The Zope 3 project has been trying to 
get off the island that Zope 2 is and into the wider Python world, but 
has only been partially successful so far. I think the Python web 
development world can learn a lot from the Zope perspective though, even 
though the opposite direction (Zope learning and reusing from the wider 
Python world) is even more important.

Regards,

Martijn