Slashdot Mirror

Try adding Plone to Zope.

Try Plone. It's easy to install, works right out of the box, and has available blog and photoalbum modules that are easy to install and configure.

You could use Zope and Plone to accomplish this sort of thing. There is a very flexible workflow implementation. With a little python scripting you can make it do just about anything.

Plone obviously scales well, but is also very easy to use for quickly getting started with small-group content management. Consider this:

• Plone is easy to install - get Andy McKay's Win32 installer or Jim Roepcke's Mac OS X installer Get 'em here and you will be up and running in 10 minutes with a Plone site pre-configured by the installer. Also you can get RPM or DEB packages.
• Default workflow and content types let you hit the road running: you have documents, news items, events, images, etc.
• Customization examples are available - Andy's ZopeZen skin is available in the collective - a good example of doing a weblog-style site in Plone.
• Plenty of add ons mean less code you have to write: check out the collective project on sf.net, mentioned above.
• Membership and security is built-in - you could do complex stuff like authenticate off of mysql or LDAP, but the default user-folder (and upcoming group support in Plone 2.0) system is capable and easy to work with without the fuss or worry.
• Simple workflows can be changed through the web; you want to do a google search for "CMF workflow just publish" - or better yet, just grant your small group publish abilities, and let them choose to do it. If you want to hack the edit script, one line of code would trigger the publish workflow transition, if you want to save some clicks. The point is that this is very customizable, and on the other end of the spectrum, you can do things like email notification in your workflow scripts with a bit of cut and pasting some stock code.
• Recipes abound on zopelabs.org under the CMF category
• With Plone 2.0, you can seriously customize the UI without changing the templates, just by haing and admin change values ina web form that are plugged into dynamically generated CSS.
• One of the most supportive mailing lists and IRC (#plone on irc.freenode.net) channels on the planet.

Workflow is the process used to manage objects in a website. An example is a company's press release: an employee writes a press release and submits it to an editor for review before it is published on the website. This review process is called a workflow and is used by site managers to ensure that site content is correct. Plone has a very powerful and flexible default workflow system that is built around Object States and User Roles...

An object's state determines whether it is available to the various types of users defined in Plone, and what other states that object can be transitioned to. Plone's default workflow includes four states: visible, pending, published and private. Site managers and developers can create custom states...

Plone uses roles to define what different users can see and do. In this way, Plone builds security into every aspect of its operation. The roles defined in a default Plone installation include anonymous, member, owner, reviewer and manger...

Owners and managers can change the states of objects they control. The states that are available are controlled by pre-defined transitions. For example, site members can submit visible objects for review or make them private and site reviewers can publish submitted items or reject them. Site managers can also customize this portion of the workflow system...

Site managers can give specific users additional rights in certain sections of the website. This can be accomplished by assigning local roles to folders. Managers and owners have permission to assign local roles...

Workflow is the process used to manage objects in a website. An example is a company's press release: an employee writes a press release and submits it to an editor for review before it is published on the website. This review process is called a workflow and is used by site managers to ensure that site content is correct. Plone has a very powerful and flexible default workflow system that is built around Object States and User Roles...

An object's state determines whether it is available to the various types of users defined in Plone, and what other states that object can be transitioned to. Plone's default workflow includes four states: visible, pending, published and private. Site managers and developers can create custom states...

Plone uses roles to define what different users can see and do. In this way, Plone builds security into every aspect of its operation. The roles defined in a default Plone installation include anonymous, member, owner, reviewer and manger...

Owners and managers can change the states of objects they control. The states that are available are controlled by pre-defined transitions. For example, site members can submit visible objects for review or make them private and site reviewers can publish submitted items or reject them. Site managers can also customize this portion of the workflow system...

Site managers can give specific users additional rights in certain sections of the website. This can be accomplished by assigning local roles to folders. Managers and owners have permission to assign local roles...

Workflow is the process used to manage objects in a website. An example is a company's press release: an employee writes a press release and submits it to an editor for review before it is published on the website. This review process is called a workflow and is used by site managers to ensure that site content is correct. Plone has a very powerful and flexible default workflow system that is built around Object States and User Roles...

An object's state determines whether it is available to the various types of users defined in Plone, and what other states that object can be transitioned to. Plone's default workflow includes four states: visible, pending, published and private. Site managers and developers can create custom states...

Plone uses roles to define what different users can see and do. In this way, Plone builds security into every aspect of its operation. The roles defined in a default Plone installation include anonymous, member, owner, reviewer and manger...

Owners and managers can change the states of objects they control. The states that are available are controlled by pre-defined transitions. For example, site members can submit visible objects for review or make them private and site reviewers can publish submitted items or reject them. Site managers can also customize this portion of the workflow system...

Site managers can give specific users additional rights in certain sections of the website. This can be accomplished by assigning local roles to folders. Managers and owners have permission to assign local roles...

You may be interested alos in looking at an example of how and why the developer of formerly famous PHP-based forum has moved (re-wrote) the whole thing to Plone.

Here are some Zope successfull stories from the real market.

These are some of the free (speech or beer) software I'd install on a family, non-gaming machine:

• Web Browser: Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird
• E-mail: Mozilla (cross-platform), Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform), Evolution (Gnome), or KMail (KDE)
• Office Suite: OpenOffice.org
• Media Player: QuickTime (Windows), Zinf (cross-platform), RealPlayer (cross-platform), WinAmp (Windows), MPlayer (Windows), XMMS (Linux)
• Image Viewer: IrfanView (Windows)
• Instant Messaging: Gaim (cross-platform)
• Personal Information Management: Palm Desktop Software (great PIM suite even if you don't own a Palm)
• Other: Acrobat Reader (although I'm weary of their DRM), Java 2 Runtime Environment, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave players, Ad-Aware (spyware remover for Windows), ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall (firewall, alternative to ZoneAlarm), Grisoft AVG Anti-Virus, FileZilla, WinRAR (not free, shareware with nag window), Ofoto desktop software (basic photo album and touch-ups, even if you don't use Ofoto's online services)

Some other software I'd install on my own desktop (dev), in decreasing order of importance:

• Cygwin, bascially all packages
• UltraEdit32 (45-day trial shareware)
• TightVNC
• Ghostscript and GSView
• Java 2 SDK
• Eclipse
• Borland JBuilder Personal
• ActiveState Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk (yes, even though they are in Cygwin), Jython
• GIMP
• POV-Ray
• At least one of Apache, Tomcat, or Plone (Zope)
• HTTrack (a website copier)

My company is a large-market daily-US newspaper, and we are building CMS systems in Zope & Plone (using Python). There may be several advantages to using a scripting language, but a shift from Java to a non-OO scripting language like PHP is likely higher risk for you - Zope (and the Zope Content Management Framwork) may offer a better solution given it has a toolset of components to leverage out-of-the box, and a simple, component-oriented way of developing content management applications with a scripting language that is easier to use, but just as scalable as Java-based solutions.

Because it uses an object database for content repositories for digital asset management, you minimize the need to do object-relational serialization and marshalling between an OO system and a relational datastore. However, this isn't as complicated as it sounds; consider something like Archetypes, a schema-driven content type generation system that also has built-in relationship management for composition of media products from related assets.

Shameless plug: I'll be giving a talk on how we are doing much this at the Plone Conference. in October in New Orleans.

Scalability costs with this type of content-management solution will not be in licensing of yor apps, but in commodity hardware (scaling out). These costs would be greater than if you used something much more bare (i.e. PHP has no security model built-in, so pages might require less resources to render, but you get more limited flexibilty or need to implement such a layer anyway for your application, negating the performance difference), but performance and price would likely be on-par or more competitive than Java solutions.

If you are not in the market to build, but to buy the first 80% of your way into a solution, Zope Corporation has built a commercial CMS product on top of these open-source foundations (Zope/CMF, Squid+ESI) - it is called Zope4Media, initially developed for Viacom and Boston.com (one of the largest local media sites out there, which might speak for the performance characteristics of a well-designed Zope application).

My company is a large-market daily-US newspaper, and we are building CMS systems in Zope & Plone (using Python). There may be several advantages to using a scripting language, but a shift from Java to a non-OO scripting language like PHP is likely higher risk for you - Zope (and the Zope Content Management Framwork) may offer a better solution given it has a toolset of components to leverage out-of-the box, and a simple, component-oriented way of developing content management applications with a scripting language that is easier to use, but just as scalable as Java-based solutions.

Because it uses an object database for content repositories for digital asset management, you minimize the need to do object-relational serialization and marshalling between an OO system and a relational datastore. However, this isn't as complicated as it sounds; consider something like Archetypes, a schema-driven content type generation system that also has built-in relationship management for composition of media products from related assets.

Shameless plug: I'll be giving a talk on how we are doing much this at the Plone Conference. in October in New Orleans.

Scalability costs with this type of content-management solution will not be in licensing of yor apps, but in commodity hardware (scaling out). These costs would be greater than if you used something much more bare (i.e. PHP has no security model built-in, so pages might require less resources to render, but you get more limited flexibilty or need to implement such a layer anyway for your application, negating the performance difference), but performance and price would likely be on-par or more competitive than Java solutions.

If you are not in the market to build, but to buy the first 80% of your way into a solution, Zope Corporation has built a commercial CMS product on top of these open-source foundations (Zope/CMF, Squid+ESI) - it is called Zope4Media, initially developed for Viacom and Boston.com (one of the largest local media sites out there, which might speak for the performance characteristics of a well-designed Zope application).

If you love scripting and programming with the way your mail is displayed and organized you will love to read your IMAP mail in Zope and especially in Plone.

I would very strongly recommend Zope/Plone. They come with a pretty good object based workflow but there is also a really powerful process based workflow with branching, etc available if you need it.

It's really easy to make it e-GIF (a UK government standard) compliant too.

We've installed it in two UK government departments and four French government departments have standardised on it too.

I'd prefer to use free software to write my articles, like LaTeX or OpenOffice and then distribute PDFs or host HTML files for people to look over. Have you looked at Plone. Pretty powerful & easy to setup & use & yeah, under a gpl compatible license. Using CMFOO, an addon, you can write in open office & once you save the document it will show up on the website. Pretty cool.

Other guys are mentioning many projects, but I want to emphsize on three project, IMHO the most important to illustrate the power of Python:

• Zope - IMHO the best ever written application server, thanks to laziness and OOP of Python;
• Plone - this portal is the best software written for Zope's CMF; Zope would stay popular only among hackers if there would be no Plone;
• Portage - the best ever written package management system; I doubt ebuilds and eclasses would be that flexible and power without Python;

Zope is a very cool web application system, and while I don't know of Guido's specific contributions I have to assume that they were great. Still, I'm confidant that Zope will carry on.

For those not familiar with Zope, it is a web application server written entirely in Python. It features an object database that, for example, lets you create an image object, and then call it from other code to automatically build your image tag based on the dimensions and title of the image stored in the object.

It's open source, developed both by the Zope community and the Zope corporation. There are at least two kick ass, open source content management systems built on top of Zope Corp's content management framework that I know of: Plone and Silva. There are a ton of add-on products that are downloadable too.

Zope does have a pretty steep learning curve, if you don't do stuff with "real" web applications (stuff that needs access control lists, user management, templating, etc) it might not be right for you, but it's great for bigger applications. Edd Dumbill talks in a recent blog entry about why Zope is worth learning and DevShed (which runs on Zope) has a good overview.

Guido and Dan Farmer are both smart guys and I'm sure that we can expect good things.

I have a wild suggestion. If you want elegant, kludge-free web applications, drop PHP. The very nature of server-page based programming (PHP, ASP, JSP, etc.), the very act of mingling your code with your markup is non-elegant. Unfortunately, there really isn't any way of separating the two in an elegant fashion, so you're sorta destined for a kludge somewhere, but there are better ways.

One kludge I rather dislike about nearly all server-side programming is the necessity of a connection to a relational database. Invariably, you must get into a lower level to get your data; often you are forced to write SQL for your data, and if your database is complex your queries can get pretty convoluted. There are tools to try to make that transparent, but the cure is often just as bad as the disease.

There are better ways, however. Zope, a web application platform based on the Python programming language, is my current favorite. The big feature that I like best about Zope, aside from the excellent builtin security framework (which is head and sholders above PHP, BTW), is the persistent object database -- with it, Zope can entirely eliminate the necessity of an external database. Not that you can't connect to an external database if you really feel like it; Zope has a built in connectivity API, and there are plugins for all your favorite relational databases.

Zope has many elegant means of managing your content, from your standard header-footer includes to context-based acquisition, to the many content management frameworks already built for you on top of Zope like Plone. Zope comes with two powerful templating languages if you don't like straight Python: DTML and Page Templates.

That said, there are drawbacks: Zope is its own server, so you have to find a hosting company that offers Zope if you don't maintain your own servers. Zope.org lists a few free hosts on the main page. Using the object database is great, but because it's transactional your disk space can quickly bloat if you running a website whose data changes frequently, like, say, a popular forum or blog.

As for the language changes... if you left perl for php because perl was ugly (and believe me, I agree), then you should try python. The language is elegance personified. It's a scripting language, so it lacks the performance of Java or C++ for computation-oriented stuff, but the stuff it does, and the simplicity! Often I've seen three short lines of Python code take tens of lines of Java code to accomplish the same task. Python is so readable you rarely need to comment your code if your variable names are well named. It's also fully object oriented, but if you don't like OO for some odd reason, you can do your stuff with just functions.

Wow... what started off as just a few lines turned into a novel. Now I'm all tired and stuff. Can you tell I really like Zope and Python? :)

It's important that people stop thinking of Zope as a Content Management System, because it isn't. Zope is an Application Server, and can be used for a multitude of different systems in addition to Content Management. Its object database and Python underpinnings make it an excellent choice for web applications.

(disclaimer: I'm involved with both Zope and Plone development)

Yes, but better still is a Zope-based, CMS framework called "Plone". You should categorize Zope as an application server, not as a web server or as a CMS proper.

Plone is a Zope product that takes it much closer to a commercial content management environment. Zope alone is mostly a framework (though you can do some very cool stuff using only it), but Plone is really the way to go if you want non-technical staff to contribute/manage content.

It sounds like you're really talking about content management more than version control. Maybe Zope and Plone will do it for you? Out of the box it gives you versioning, authentication and a decent database. The database isn't the most scalable, but you can extend it to use any number of database and database-like backends, like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Berkeley, and various pay-for dbs.

I've been evaluating similiar solutions myself and found that TUTOS and dotproject (both from souceforge) were too incomplete to really meet my needs.

So instead I've been evaluating Content Management Frameworks or Content Management Systems which can easily be adapeted for this use. So Far I've looked at:

Mambo Open Source Which I have found to look and feel great, easy to use, modify, but too lightweight to really meet a project portals needs without significant modification.

Zope
and the CMS based on Zope called Plone
Which I found can fit the bill, but the learning curve is extremely high and may have too much complexity for easy extension development or modification.

Currently I am looking at
Typo3 which seems to fit the bill for both sophistication yet ease of use and extension. However, it doesn't have an extension yet (that I'm aware of) for CVS or a similiar version control system (Would be interested to know if there is one?)

Great resources to check for Open source project management/CMS solutions:
Open and Free Project Management tools
Open Source CMS - Try before you by! with lots of online demo sites available.

Good luck! Follow up with what you decide to use please!

In fact.. Since the Texas Govt. is broke they are cutting back on all expenses. They even wrote the Governor's website using opensource software... and SURPRISE Its been *very* successful!! Have a look at Governor Rick Perry's Website which is running the Zope application server with the Plone Content Management System

Plone is Python scripts and other bits running on top of Zope, a web application server written in Python.

Of course there's also examples of Python being used on the desktop, but as a web application, Plone (and of course Zope) are worth a good hard look. To some extent, Zope can be considered the 'killer app' for the Python language.

I belive http://umiststudents.com/ runs on Plone. Obviously http://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/ runs on standard Zope. That looks OK to me. Some UK Home Office sites too eg http://www.drugs.gov.uk/Home. 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 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.

...or why python is better on the backend and the front-end.

Take namespaces for special-purpose library stuff. Or inline eval (include) of logic code (bad, bad, bad). Good analysis (mine) here, including comparitive code to demonstrate my point.

Like Java, Python already does assignment by reference, copy is optional. PHP is just figuring this out. PHP's language leaves much to be desired in team programming and code readability. Using 'Design Patterns' is only half the equation. You can do component oriented programming, but some languages are going to be better than others at facilitaing it in a manner that works in reality. PHP5, unfortunately, won't hold a candle to Zope 3, which is really going to compete at the level of J2EE and .NET as well-thought-out enterprise component frameworks.

PHP lacks object persistence, multiple inheritance, full-featured transaction machinery, a built-in security model, an interactive command-line interpreter, and it is too tied to web-scripting only. And becuase it doesn't have a security model that binds operations to roles/permissions, it can't easily put gateway methods with bound roles (like Zope's proxy roles) between web code and SQL code, leading to increased chance of SQL injection vulnerabilities.

On the other hand, Zope has object perisistence, transactional RDBMS integration and connection abstraction, templated, componentized SQL methods, a security framework, and Python, which is a much better language (explicit is better than implicit). And if you need to do any sort of content-management, Zope has a mature component-oriented framwork in the CMF, with a killer-app implementation in Plone. It also has XML-RPC, WebDAV, Caching managers, and all sorts of other goodies you won't find out of the box in PHP.

PHP is fast, and it is easy, but it is by no means scalable. PHP offers a gentle slope learning-curve, and quick easy hacks, but is somewhat like a crack addiction. What PHP as a framework needs to do is not reinvent the wheel in the language department, and use a pre-existing, scalable, enterprise-class OO scripting language, and utilize a templating technology that doesn't promote mixing logic and presentation - but what's the point, since it would look remarkably like Zope?

They're just about to release Plone 1.0 which is basically a pre-configured Zope with CMF and some of the other new plugins all set up. Their web site is basically their product as it comes up when you first install it, so it gives you a good idea what it looks like.

It's big if all you need is a weblog, but it's perfect if you want a platform that you can build on and add applications to while maintaining a lot of flexibility (user management, etc)

Be sure to check out plone. Built on top of Zope+CMF, its definately worth a look.

plone.org just linked to great little promo video by someone at the Government of Hawaii (Windows Media Format). [ low bandwidth | high bandwidth | 1.7MB .AVI ] showing the features of their new website built with Python, Zope, Zope CMF Plone skin, etc. All open source, of course.

To go all out in the Zope world I'd suggest a CMF Portal, potentially one based on Plone

If workflow is your interest, you should check out Zope's Content Management Framework - and in particular the Plone implementation based on this. Plone makes the whole thing more user friendly (basically, the CMF sucks in its standard version ;) and also incorporates DCWorkflow as part of the solution.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the people behind Plone, so I might be biased ;)