Zope question: collaborative environments?

[Thomas A. Bryan]

Peter Hansen wrote:

> (Unfortunately, we have found neither tracker suitable for use yet but
> perhaps your mileage may vary.)

The bug trackers would almost have to be better than what we're using now
(a product based on MS-Access, with bizarre limitations, little ability to 
customize the tool, and fairly slow response time).  In the long term, I 
expect that we'd want to customize whatever bug tracking tool we were using 
which is why I was looking at open source options (Zope, SourceForge, 
Bugzilla, etc.).

> I'll moderate my original recommendation then.  *Do* look at Zope, and
> most especially, before anything else, the concept of wikis (ZWiki is
> the Zope implementation of Wiki).  A set of ZWiki pages provides not
> only a "shared group memory" area with extremely low overhead and
> inconvenience factor (allow it to be used easily by any old developer),
> they can also in a pinch substitute for almost any other kind of feature
> which might be lacking or insufficiently mature on Zope for your needs.

Thanks for the advice.  I think that what I need to do now is download Zope 
and start playing with it.  If we actually use it at work, then perhaps 
I'll become familiar enough with it to admin a Zope server on the Starship
(says one of the Starship admins who wonders when the Starship will be back 
in permanent service).

> Just please make sure that nobody misunderstands: 
[...snip...]
> Personally,
> I've always felt the strong need to customize almost *any* development
> tool I've used, and finally, with Zope, this is possible.  The fact that
> this customization can build on our Python experience is a major bonus.

Perhaps I'll just point my boss to this thread so that he has a better 
idea of what we'd be getting into.  I'm not sure what sort of resources 
he will be able to commit to Zope in what time frame.  I think that both 
he and I feel the same way about customizing our team's development tools.  
Who doesn't? :)  And going with Zope would certainly be better than 
building something from scratch ourselves!  

>From my side of the discussion, I've been wanting to play with Zope for 
over a year now, but I simply never had the time.  If nothing else, I now 
have the opportunity to play with Zope for a few days at work. :)  If 
everything looks good, then we'll finally have a set of development support 
tools that we can tweak and customize until they fit our team's needs.

I'll probably post again about our decision/success/failure.

moving-forward-with-eyes-open-ly yours

---Tom