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Zope question: collaborative environments?

Jason Cunliffe jasonic at nomadicsltd.com
Fri Oct 27 15:19:55 EDT 2000 
Tom

Reading your second post, and also Jerry Spickelmire's more encouraging
reply... I would like to say that despite my scary previous warning.. it
sounds after all that like Zope might be fine for you folks :-)

- You appear to have solid in-house Python skills + are willing to hire more
- Your boss sounds cool
- You do not really need the 'supergroupware' app which we lunged at
- There is a lot of ready-to-run Zope components which will quickly get you
going..

- You arrive at Zope at a good time. The book will be out soon and the
on-line text is already available:
http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/
My suggestion print this out and comb bind at once to help you decide to
zope or not to zope!

- Zope install very fast on nay machine and can be tested. I run it
typically on my sony win98 laptop in the background most of the time. No
problem moving work to Linux box the other side of the world.

- ZODB can be imported and exported singly or in hierarchical pieces. This
alone without any plugins means it is immediately 'collaborative' ware.
Intelligent ZODB use alone without any other Zope products allows for some
very good 'applications'. Since you can FTP right into the ZODB you
caninfact use Python's own FTPlib to embed some very handy routines to
update the ZODB. A great plus is you can take your site with you offline ..
good for backup but also good for faster development. You will have to have
a good strategy for versioning though.

- It is about 6 lines of code to make Zope pages which will automatically
add links whenever users upload new material. Add a few more lines, perhaps
via python method and you can certainly track these.

- Zope has good undo features which may be handy for you.

- Anything you want to do special you can do in Python and use as Python
External Methods. This is very effective and easy to update... Later and as
your Zope Zen advances and the need arises you can convert these to become
reusable Zope Products. In practice you may not need or want to. For example
you can probably rapidly connect 'Perforce' python objects to Zope in this
manner.

- Permission give you very wide control from root folder down to object
level.

- There is very technically responsible and responsive online zope
community. Ask and ye shall be answered not at all  or in mountains of
precision..

As Jerry says, Zope _is_ addictive.. Just when you are about to give the
zopelist reading or demo download fix, up comes another great idea, cool
hack or tantalizing new 'product' is announced. enjoy!


Jason


> a bug tracking system like Bugzilla, document repository, etc.).  I was
> hoping that Zope + plugins + a few weeks of scripting by an experienced
> Python coder would give us something basic and usable while providing us
> with a platform for future improvements and extensions as time permits.
>
> > and over time dedicate at least a fraction of somebody's time to
> > improving and developing it.  We have a lot of faith in Zope's future,
> > and I recommend it on that basis.  But it won't take a few weeks to get
> > what you want!
>
> I guess the question is whether a few weeks would get us something that
> would be usable by the developers without causing a huge administration
> burden or training requirement for the developers.  Another major option
> is SourceForge, but I hesitate to use it because no one here knows PHP
> and because we would only populate it with a single project.  I also set
> one up a few months ago, and it was non-trivial to get everything set up
> at first.
>
> I'd personally like to hire a Python/Unix hacker college student here in
> Raleigh who would be willing to dive into Zope for a 10-20 hours per week
> job.  My boss said that he'd hire one if we could find him.  Anyone
> interested?
>
> Tom
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