Michael Pelletier and Amos Latteier have posted an early draft
of their upcomign Zope book for O’Reilly & Associates at the
Zope Web site. Though it’s not been through the O’Reilly editorial
process, these sample chapters are definitely worth a look.
From the Preface:
“Zope was originally designed with a newspaper business model in
mind. The Zope customer was an Internet Service Provider who had
many customers (newspapers) that in turn had many customers (the
newspaper customers). To scale in this environment, Zope had to
embrace the idea of safely delegating control at each stage to
customers below your designated level in the web site.”
“In order to safely delegate control, many things need to be
considered. First, you need to present information in an easy to
understand way. Most people understand clicking on folders better
than issuing database commands, so Zope uses a hierarchical object
database that feels like a filesystem. Command line tools can be
difficult to use, and people are generally comfortable with web
browsers, so Zope was built to be managed with a web browser.
Finally collaborative environments require facilities to keep
people from stepping on each others toes, so Zope developed undo,
versions, and other tools to help people work safely together.”
“These features make Zope an environment for programming and
authoring web content. Finally, releasing Zope as Open Source
software provided for business decision makers with the power to
control their own technology.”
“Thus, more power for more people is the first key
value statement for Zope.”