[Zope-CMF] what lies in store for us if we choose Zope/CMF?

[Francis Kelly]

We are in the process of building a web-site
automation tool that will allow users to go to our
site and create their own website that will be hosted
on our server. In addition to a bunch of static HTML
pages, their site will be able to include management
of mailing lists, some calendaring function, probably
a discussion forum.

So, we're looking at using a CMS for administering all
of these small sites. 

Zope/CMF (maybe using Plone as well) seems like a
pretty good option. I've read quite a bit about the
advantages of Zope/CMF to be very intrigued.

The downside of Zope seems to be its learning curve:
although it's allegedly easy to start off with Zope,
several things I've read have indicated that the curve
slopes gently at first and gets much steeper later on.


It's a little challenging to figure out exactly what
that means.

My questions then:
--Basically, I don't know what lies in store for us if
we choose Zope/CMF: when does the learning curve get
steep and how steep are we talking? I mean is it that
getting the basic site up takes a day, but then when
you want to use the clustering features it'll take you
3 weeks to get them right?

--Can anyone direct me to a case-study anywhere on the
net (or if you have one of your own :) ) that would
step me through the easy and hard parts of a Zope/CMF
deployment? 

--Also, can anyone suggest some Zope/CMF equivalents
(if they even exist) in other languages such as PHP
and Java? Would Midgard in PHP be akin to Zope/CMF?

Thank you very much for your help.

Francis 


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