From an email with my old CTO, at my at my old company.

> I too have my doubts about investing too much in Zope

Like I’ve said, several times I’ve really wanted to fall in live with Zope, because at some level they get it. And at some levels they dont.

The dream of being able to build a simple application (say a calendar) and with the push of a button add a real role based permission system, localization, and the ability to hang discussions off events, is incredibly sexy. I understand why people get involved with Zope.

But I just can’t give up my ideals enough to do things the Zope way is what it really comes down to. Its ugly, its the worst end of functional programming (in Python!), and it almost feels Microsoftian in its monolithic design.

Maybe you can’t have one without the other, I don’t know.

Hey, BTW, you mentioned a couple of Zope alternatives
last night… do you have any links to the few you
mentioned (I want to check them out this weekend).

Bricolage started life as CMS for Salon.com, I’ve played with it a little, I liked it. Its just a CMS. It has users, and roles, and work flow, but it doesn’t really have Zope’s rich history as an application framework. In Perl.

Webware is the best of the ‘servlets for python’ projects. Relatively mature, and a good community.