About Zope

Zope is the award-winning open source platform for building content management systems. Zope's worldwide developer community numbers in the thousands and contributes to the software's continuing success.

Zope Architecture

Companies that buy prepackaged content management solutions must often compromise on functionality. Building homegrown solutions may compromise timeliness and ensures that software must be maintained for years. By combining the control from open source software, Zope's global developer community, along with unbeatable services, companies get the best of both buy and build.

Unbeatable ROI

Zope provides an extraordinary business model: owning source code, extraordinary services, support, training and solutions provided by the creators of the Zope software.

Implementation Speed

Zope's architecture combines the most productive programming language in the world with an advanced object architecture, resulting in extraordinary implementation speed. Combined with ultimate flexibility, Zope embraces the speed of business change, and backs up the architecture with services from Zope Corporation to accelerate creation, launch and maintenance of the site.

Distributed Control

System administrators may establish roles for users within a Zope application. For example, a system administrator may establish the roles "System Manager," "Content Manager" and "Author" within a custom Zope application. The Content Manager may establish templates for Authors to use for publishing. The Author's work thus inherits the style established by the Content Manager. Authors can then focus on content, not style. Zope enables the Content Manager to change styles and have it automatically applied to the content.

Plethora of Plug-ins

Zope has a vast array of plug-ins, termed "Products." Products exist that communicate with relational databases, authenticate via LDAP, and perform custom computations or custom data encapsulation. Individuals can create their own classes of objects through the Web. The Zope community continuously builds new objects that plug into Zope.

Interoperable

Zope contains built-in HTTP and FTP servers and can also run with an existing Web server (e.g., Apache, Microsoft IIS, iPlanet/Netscape). Client programs can get or set data with HTTP, WebDAV, FTP, or XML-RPC. Existing content creation tools like Adobe GoLive, Macromedia DreamWeaver, or Microsoft Office can store content directly in Zope.

Transactional Support

The transactional nature of Zope is part of its extraordinary power. When script authors embed actions into Zope routines, they do not need to worry about having to roll-back changes in case of a failure. Zope will do this automatically with all compliant objects. Transactional support means scripts can be constructed in less time, because the complexity is handled by Zope.

Open Source

Traditional systems are proprietary. Users commit to a vendor as a sole provider for the duration of their use of the product. Even Zope's underlying language, Python, is open source. This eliminates much of the risk of choosing a particular vendor, and puts the user in control.

Object Database

The object database is a collection of objects that define names, actions and data for content contained in Zope. Data in the object database is controlled through the Web, via management screens, so any user with a Web browser can create and manage content. Performance can be managed and tuned by expanding the cache of objects that can be active at any time.

Strength in Numbers

Zope has a community of thousands of users who create, test and deploy Zope objects. The user community is a great strength because members answer questions and contribute developed objects back to the community at large.

Operating Systems

Unix

• BSD - FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
• Linux - Red Hat, Mandrake, SUSE, Caldera OpenLinux, etc.
• Solaris

Microsoft Windows

• 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000

Web Servers

Zope runs with a built-in webserver, or with CGI or FastCGI

Apache

• Microsoft IIS
• iPlanet/Netscape

Databases

• Interbase
• MySQL
• Oracle 7.0 or higher
• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server via ODBC
• Sybase

(some adapters my require a C compiler to build)

System Requirements

• 16 MB free RAM
• 166 MHz CPU or faster
• 20 MB of disk space