[sclug] Happy New Year (Was: Ways of updating a web site)

[Antony Bartlett]

Happy New Year, everyone!
Before I went off to a new year party, I'd managed to get as far as 
Chapter 6 of building Linux From Stratch without any apparent mishaps - 
which I reckon is pretty reasonable going.  I still feel like a newbie 
here, but I do think some of the bash tricks that it uses may have 
rubbed off on me.  Now it looks like I'm going to be playing with Zope 
for a while instead.  It looks pretty cool, thanks for the suggestion 
Pieter!

Plone (which sits on top of Zope) seems to do everything that I am 
looking for (and a whole bunch of other things besides), out of the box 
- except that knowledge of a markup language is required to edit 
content.  Then I found Epoz - a WYSIWYG editor add-on for it... 
unfortunately, while I was playing with Epoz I managed to accidently 
link to picture on my local machine instead of uploading it... if I can 
make that mistake then I don't think we've quite reached beginner level 
yet, but I can concieve of a modification that will make adding images a 
whole lot friendlier, so maybe I'll have a peek at the code for Epoz next.

I can see delving into the depths of Zope in order to better understand 
it taking some time (and I don't know where to start), especially in 
view of the fact that I don't know any DHTML or Python (yet) - but these 
things usually prove to be pretty enjoyable once I get going.  I guess 
that's what it's all about really.

    Best wishes,

       Antony


pieter claassen wrote:

>Hi Antony,
>
>I have been playing with Zope (python based web application server:
>www.zope.org) and have had good results with some caveats.
>
>For all web stuff from beginners level to pretty advanced it is great
>and reasonably documented. However, things do get a bit sticky if you
>try and do large projects in it because you have to then develop a
>"Product" in Zope parlance and that means probably abandoning the
>coolest feature of Zope that is its through the web management and
>development interface.
>
>Also, some of the 3rd party products are at a little flaky and depending
>on your OSS profile, you might get a good response from the maintainers
>or not. I am thinking of Squishdot as a slashdot replacement, the
>E-commerce module and even things like Z-classes which is a web frontend
>for building Zope products.
>
>Otherwise I will highly recommend it.
>
>The main benefits of Zope over PHP or Perl as CGI dev environments are:
>1. Standardisation because your application and data is in a Zope DB
>(ZODB is their OO DB) and it can be backed up and moved to any other
>ZODB and deployed in minutes with the same look and feel etc.
>2. Built in authentication and authorisation framework (very
>comprehensive and well debugged in Zope. In conventional CGI you have to
>install somebody else's or roll your own or use webserver features and
>security is an issue.)
>3. Version control, RDBA and Z SQL interface, Z catalog (site catalog
>and search facility) and other tools directly integrated in Zope. You
>can get these things for PHP etc. but there is not always an easy
>upgrade path and getting a consistent look and feel across all your
>applications is a major issue.
>4. Then there are some products in Zope which are supper cool like the
>Zwiki which is just wicked!
>5. With a bit of effort it handles ftp and virtual hosting well.
>6. It has a complete Content Management System in it but I have not
>really looked at it in detail.
>
>Most distro's come with Zope packaged so just explore and see what you
>think of it.
>
>A last word of advice, be careful about developing large products in the
>Z classes interface because your time might be wasted. I developed a
>bulletin board as a Zclass and it worked pretty well. However, when I
>exported the product for distribution, it enables its DRM by default
>which meant when I installed it on a new system and wanted to make
>changes to it, it wouldn't allow me (the owner of the product didn't
>allow for GPL type behaviour). Having blown the original development
>environment away, I was stuck with a "windows media player" that didn't
>work too well.
>
>Hope this helps,
>Pieter
>