[Zope] why use zope?

[Peter Sabaini]

hi all,

i've been (and am) trying to convince people here of the zope way for
some time (vs. iis / frontpage or dreamweaver). people here publish
their data with frontpage or dreamweaver and some kind of template
system for the layout, or (print-only) they use an old, proprietary
system which i have the honour of exporting the data out of (into
oracle which zope (and other systems) read from). 

i was successfull mostly if the area/data concerned was rather
structured (eg. newspaper system, data always with title / lead /
fulltext / author etc.).

the argumentation mainly is something like '(more or less
rigid) structure vs. freeform', 'structure' being zope, 'freeform'
being dreamweaver/classical fs-based webserver. 

i think it's easy to find arguments for structured publishing if the
data you deal with has some inherent structure --

* content/code separation
* able to (manually) search on specific fields
* automated search, making possible other link structures than the
tree structure of the fs approach
* able to change layout simply, personalisation of layout

and more i guess.

there's two things i think would be good to accomplish --

* making publishing of structured data as simple and fast as possible 
* developing more generic structures to match the data that is
not-that-structured. 

or so i think. 

the "why-cut-n-past" problem below would fall into the first category
i guess. 

my users cut-n-paste (no complaints so far). but i think it should
also work if you managed to get data into *some* structure, eg. my
dumb-ass approach would be to let the editors put their titles between
<h1> ... </h1>, lead be <h2> .. </h2>, author a different text color,
body jsut plain text, anything. just so they then can upload the
document and that document gets parsed so it can be read / edited /
searched / etc. later on. 

tell me what you think of this.

ow, that mozilla build has finished _finally_. gotta play with m13
(alpha!) now :)

peter.


kedai@kedai.com.my wrote:

hi all,

firstly, it's not me asking that question.  it's the users.  here's
the
situation.:

we have developed a ZClass that caters for the publishing/serving of
news items.
 we already have contents done in quark, pagemaker and other formats.
users
(editorial) currently cut and paste from the source.  

when the users saw that they have to cut and paste, they asked why?
and they
pointed to frontpage, pagemill, etc as a solution.

now, we don't want that, but how can we explain the benefit of zope
over the
others.  i have read the zope against cf, vignette thread, but that's
too high
level for the users to grasp, me think.

so, really, what's the benefit of using zope instead of the others;
esp for the
non-techies.

p/s - maybe it's our failure in providing a better solution in
exporting
contents from window$ apps that cause this question.  help, pointers,
docs,
welcomed.

 -- 
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http://www.kedai.com.my/kk
Am I Evil?



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_________________________________________________
peter sabaini, mailto: sabaini@niil.at
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