Zope is great and I'm heartily recommending it. I has some idioms in it's design that you may or may not like, like a reliance on multiple inheritance (that they call "mix-in classes"). But the truth is that they have put a lot of thought into the design of Zope, and it just plain works. Zope uses plug-in applications called "products". A product is some python classes that make up an area of functionality, either a full fledged application (like a web log or publishing system) or a building component for a larger application (LDAP authentication, rating system, Internet Explorer WYSIWYG editing of HTML in forms).

A drop-down menu lets you instantiate the product, that is install it anywhere you want in your web hierarchy. You then configure each instance through the web. User management and session mangement is built in, the database methods return rows with each column value tagged by it's column name, something I'm still to find in the DBI module.

All your objects (instances of products, data, users) are stored in a hierarchical database where they can address each other in a funny kind-of-inheritance-based way called acquisition. At first it is bewildering, but it makes it so easy for objects to call each other. In perl I usually store objects in slots (Atributes) of each other. This becomes messy.

Sure, there are some design decisions done in Zope that you have to follow and that you may or may not like, but development is about 3x faster for me in Zope than in Perl, and I've done a lot more perl than zope.

One problem if you're living in e.g. Scandinavia is that there are very few Zope developers around. Here in Sweden I think there are three (myself included, though I'm more of a hobbyist). This makes it hard to recommend customers to use it, since one emigration, one change of career and a traffic accident would reduce the number of developers to zero. So, for my customers I'm still using perl.

/jeorgen

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