An Open-Source Web Application Server
By Brian Wilson
Many of the Web projects I work on are for nonprofit organizations, and I must lean heavily on volunteers who have little experience working on Web sites. As a result, I'm very interested in tools that help me set up and maintain a basic site layout, while letting beginners enter and maintain content.
I heard that Zope could help me, so I decided to try it. Zope was developed by Digital Creations, which provides commercial support for it (www.digicool.com). The introduction to the online Zope Book (www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB) says that Zope is a framework for building Web applications. It allows for powerful collaboration, simple content management, and Web component use. Sounds good so far. Because Zope is open source and runs on Red Hat Linux, I'll have access to updates and bug fixes.
Zope is written in Python, making it portable across many platforms (www.python.org). Currently, it's available in binary format for Windows (9x/NT), Linux, and Solaris, plus it can be compiled on other Unix platforms. I used the pre-built Linux version
for this article (Zope 2.2.4), which I tested on both versions 6.2 and 7.0 of Red Hat Linux. Zope is under active development, and as I write this, there's also an alpha of 2.3.0 available in source form.
Zope
Latest stable version: 2.2
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