Zope 3 Alpha 1 Released 14
nosse_elendili writes "These are exciting times for those of us who use Zope, because the long anticipated Zope 3 Alpha 1 has been released! For those who don't know, Zope is a powerful but somewhat obscure free, open-source, cross-platform web application server built around Python. Zope 3 is a complete rewrite and rethinking of the Zope platform so it looks and operates quite differently than previous releases. However, if you have never played with Zope before you should probably just read about Zope 3 and stick to the stable version with the Plone content management system installed. This is only an alpha release after all and Zope3 looks and acts alot like Zope2 + Plone."
Re:Zope Wanabe (Score:2, Informative)
The Zope community, though, is very rich, and the mailing lists generate a lot of traffic; also, #zope and #plone on openprojects (or whatever its called now) are useful resources.
Zope 3X really provides a framework much more focussed on developers creating and leveraging services and applications, and less on the out-of-the-box feel. The main ideas behind Zope3X are to lower the barrier to writing Python product code, and leverage existing Python modules and applications more readily; also, focusing on component-oriented design (favor composition to inheritance and a bunch of mixin classes; where Java forces you through lack of multiple inheritance to do this, Python is more flexible, and with this comes a downside of overuse of inheritance in Python, of which Zope2 is a good example; Zope3 solves this to lower the learning curve and decrease complexity).
Overall, I think Zope 3 will become a convincing alternative to
Re:Zope Wanabe (Score:2, Informative)
I belive http://umiststudents.com/ [umiststudents.com] runs on Plone. Obviously http://plone.org [plone.org] does too. Neither are ugly looking by any stretch any both very usable. A lot of effort has gone into Plone to make it look "plain" - that is clean & simple to use. That's surprisingly hard with such a full featured CMS. Much easy to make one cluttered.
Setup's much quicker & simpler than the apache/php/mysql combo.There's a plone installer now that even sets everything up for you. That's your webserver, app server, content management system and database all in one.
As for Zope sites looking the same - just look at the various sites in this post. I'd say Postnuke sites all look far more alike to be honest.
Bruce Eckel's site http://www.mindview.net/ [mindview.net] runs on standard Zope. That looks OK to me. Some UK Home Office sites too eg http://www.drugs.gov.uk/Home [drugs.gov.uk]. All look pretty professional.
Zope is excellent at wiki's too. The whole "page is an object" model fits wikis very well. Zwiki http://www.zwiki.org [zwiki.org] is one of the best I've seen,
Zope, Plone, and Zwiki are all progressing at a fair pace. If you haven't tried in a while it's worth having another look. I think one of the main problems is that it's just so different to other solutions out there. I'm used to J2EE development. From JSPs it's reasonably simple to pick up ASP & PHP. Zope requires a bit more of a mindshift.