Well, first, let me say the more I look at the Zope, the more I'm amazed. There's a huge number of third party apps and community support out there, updating the system is a breeze (just drop in a Hotfix, restart, and you're done), the ability to rollback changes (though it doesn't always seem to work) is wonderful. Almost everything can be minutely customized and there's a solution to almost every problem.

One problem: KDE has a long history of storing in and updating the website from CVS. Multiple people can work on the website and keep track of it this way. Zope, by default, however uses some sort of proprietary DB (still OpenSource, of course) that you can't directly access, and so one would have to use the Web interface or the rather clunky FTP interface to update it. The Zope FTP interface is not fail-safe either and doesn't support many of the usual FTP features. A comprehensive script would have to be written to handle the situation. Would it even work? Probably not, but maybe you can correct me.

Assuming that KDE dropped CVS and started the Zope Web interface instead, personally I don't see this working too well with multiple people trying to update and maintain the site.

Second, mirror sites... but we've got a similar problem with PHP. Then again I'd imagine, PHP would be less of a problem than Zope for mirror sites, as PHP is pretty common out there. It's almost the defacto Linux web-scripting platform.

Third, I didn't feel comfortable advocating Zope instead of PHP to Kurt, because after all this time, I still haven't learnt it properly and I still have trouble figuring things out. I'm not generally dense, but I had trouble figuring out some of the Zope syntax/API without reading lots of seemingly inadequate documentation (which sometimes don't help if you don't know Zope basics :).

On the other hand, although I don't know PHP, Andreas Pour has constantly impressed me with how much and how quickly he can accomplish something in it. I get the impression that PHP has a less steep learning curve than Zope and is easier to grasp for someone who just wants to get down to hacking. I'm sure if it came to it Andreas could offer Kurt a PHP solution faster than I could figure out one in Zope. :)

In short, more people around knew PHP and less of us knew Zope. No doubt Zope would have been a great solution too, but the implementation would have probably required a little more effort and possibly outside help (although Kurt may certainly be better at grasping Zope than me). ;)

Cheers,
Navin.

• Points well taken by Eron Lloyd on Wednesday 01/Nov/2000, @05:03

  *nod* ... and thats fine. The site DOES look well, regardless. Maybe we can get an IOSlave for WebDAV and XML-RPC/SOAP for KDE, and make accessing the Object Database somewhat easier for KDE Users (I envision managing Zope from Konqueror). Well, at any rate, use what ya know, be it PHP or whatever - just keep up the excellent work! Eron

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