[thelist] zope: a few questions

[george donnelly]

[Chris W. Parker]

> hi.
>
> this is related to my previous question to the list entitled "intranet
> framework(s)". i guess i should have entitled it "cms: what do you
> use?". at any rate, i have found and installed zope but am afraid i do
> not fully understand the zope paradigm. so here are some questions.
>
> 1. is all the content of the website stored in the zope db? i created my
> first page via the admin control panel and called it "mypage_html"
> (mimicing the index_html file that is found in the root) and then viewed
> it via "http://localhost:8080/". however i was not at all thrilled with
> using the textarea box as my editor so i tried to open the file in
> html-kit. to my dismay i was not able to find any file called
> mypage_html. i came to the conclusion that there is no such file called
> mypage_html but rather there is a virtual file contained in a db
> somewhere. is this true?

yes, all content and code is by default stored in the ZODB. Of course you
can also store content in a relational db and there are some add-on content
objects available for storing things on the filesystem but still allowing
them to be used in Zope: ExtImage, ExtFile, File System Directory View and
Local FS, but they will not give you a complete solution.

what protocol does html-kit use to connect? zope comes with built-in FTP and
WebDAV servers which are very convenient for remote-editing (I use them all
the time). Did you start the FTP and WebDAV servers on your zope? on what
ports?

For all intents and purposes your file does exist. :)

> 2. can i edit pages in any other editor besides the zope interface
> without having to import that file via the zope interface?

yes. any one that supports FTP or WebDAV, e.g., BBEdit (I use this daily to
work on my zope sites), Dreamweaver (tho this has some catches), GoLive,
etc. There is also External Editor which will be useful for editing from a
Windows machine.

> 3. can server side scripting be used with zope? afaik python and Perl*
> will work, but i'd like to use asp. but then again i've also read that
> using IIS with zope is no good.

I don't think there's anything particularly bad about using IIS and Zope
together...? About using ASP in Zope: I'm sure its possible with some
significant development work but I don't believe this is currently possible.

Python and Zope Page Templates (the current fav way to do stuff in zope) are
not that hard to learn...

> so far i'm not sure if i like zope or not. i was pleased that it worked
> without any tweaking after the intstallation, but i don't like the idea
> that every file is stored in a db and that i may not be able to use my
> own server side language with it.

zope is great, but it does take some getting used to; it works differently
in some ways than your average php/mysql stuff. You might want to install
the CMF and Plone products to see what can be done with Zope.

There are some alternate db options out there, e.g. Berkeley and Directory
Storage (which stores each object and each revision of each object in a
separate file accessible in normal ways - you might like this.) Both options
are fairly mature.

Directory Storage

http://dirstorage.sourceforge.net/

Berkeley

http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/ZWN-2002-11-27#6


I suspect that you're going to encounter a lot of frustration trying to
integrate ASP and Zope.

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