[Zope] Is Zope the answer?

[sean.upton@uniontrib.com]

Yes - Zope is THE answer... ;)

I don't usually speak in absolutes, but I know a good match when I see one.
Take a look at the CMF and perhaps Plone (which is a nice UI on top of CMF).
Both would be easily be a good starting framework for content-oriented sites
(since you want to catalog events, news items, photos, ads).  The CMF does
membership, discussion, etc.  

You would need to do a bit of work to get email-list management appended to
such a framework, but other than that there are a lot of people who have
done at least a good portion of the things you mention using the CMF.  

Another nice benefit to Zope and the CMF is relational database integration
for things like booking.  For example, let's hypothetically say you had an
event that had booking info related to it stored in the relational database.
In the Plone UI, for example, in the skins tool you would simply add a page
template and python script that used a ZSQL method to get a listing of
bookings for that event object, then you would go into the "actions" for the
event type in the Types tool and add the name of that method as an object,
and it would automatically appear in the UI as a tab for the object.  So you
could then click on that tab to list your bookings stored in a relational
database for the said content object.  I guess what I am saying is that Zope
really exemplifies the "best in class" in creating web applications with
hybrid storage paradigms.

http://cmf.zope.org
http://www.plone.org

I work for a large daily US newspaper, and we are porting most of our site
infrastructure to the CMF (it's good stuff, I promise!).  Plus, Python
really gives you the ease of PHP with the scalability of Java. I would post
this question to the Zope-CMF list or to the Plone-Users list (on
sourceforge); I think you might get some good responses from people who have
created components like portions of what you describe.

Cheers,
Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Purkiss [mailto:stephenpurkiss@btopenworld.com]
Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 10:44 AM
To: zope@zope.org
Subject: [Zope] Is Zope the answer?


Hi,

I've been asked to do some more development on a London night clubbing site
I wrote a while ago - http://www.belugablues.com

It was the first site I wrote in PHP (using Java before until I saw how much
easier PHP was) and so the code is not the best.

I might rewrite from scratch, but I'm also considering rewriting it using a
framework or CMS as a base and was wondering if any of you good people could
advise whether using Zope would be a "good thing" - and if not then any
other recommendations welcome. I've been looking through all the ones on
http://www.cmsinfo.org and am just getting more confused. I want to find a
system I can work with on more than just this one project. I developed a
site using PostNuke, but the design of this site is quite tight and wouldn't
fit into PN very well - different world.

Current Features of the site:

* Event management systems so staff can add an event which users of the site
can book free guest list places on - a guest list is automatically built so
staff can print it off before the event.
* General content management system for news, advertising, and page
information
* Membership system so people can sign up to the site
* Email list function so staff can mail the whole list or subsections of the
list (i.e.. depending on when their birthday is)
* Photo Gallery

Requested features:

* HTML email (ya boo :) with direct links to book guest list places
* Enable for multiple countries & cities
* Remove initial login page so people don't have to sign up until they want
to book something (as I suggested they did in the first place...)
* Expand booking system to include hotels, cars, yachts & apartments. This
won't be all online, but simply a form which requests start and end dates
for booking the items then the rest is done manually.

Hope the list doesn't mind me asking this - I've done as much research as I
can without asking. Any advice would be most gratefully appreciated. I'm not
afraid to learn new stuff, I just don't want to end up choosing the wrong
system!!!

Thanks



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