[Pydotorg-redesign] Re: [marketing-python] Can Python compete with Visual Basic?

Dylan Reinhardt python at dylanreinhardt.com
Fri Aug 8 23:26:44 EDT 2003


[Forwarding  this discussion to pydotorg-redesign as requested]

On Fri, 2003-08-08 at 14:20, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> (See my response to Aahz's note for some of my problems with Zope.)
> 
>     Dylan> The core advantage of Zope is that it facilitates user
>     Dylan> participation.  Zope (including CMF/Plone) is a very solid
>     Dylan> platform for building systems that allow users to contribute and
>     Dylan> manage content.
> 
> I see that as a plus, though more so in situations where you have either a
> huge number of contributors, 

It's tough to know how many contributors the would have if contributions
were easier to make.  

At present, the number of people who contribute to c.l.python are
probably a good estimate of the upper bound.  The number who already
contribute content to python.org are a fair lower bound estimate.


> or where you have contributors who are likely
> to be antagonistic toward one another 

*That* I can't speak to... :-)


> Editorial oversight - good, no filesystem involvement - I'm not so sure
> about. 

Just to clarify... all this information *does* get written to the
filesystem.  It's just that access to the filesystem is mediated through
Zope.  The information is saved to disk, shell access isn't required.


> That would be good if we had people beating the doors down to contribute.
> We need more domain-specific contributors, not generalists like me.

Again, tough to know what we *might* have if we did more to encourage
contributions.  Maybe this is a case of "if you build it, they will
come" or maybe it isn't.


> Understood.  Roles is one of Zope's strong points.  One of Python's mantras
> is, "we're all adults here".  In the context of the website that means I'm
> responsible enough to keep my fingers out of the stuff I don't know about.
> Barry doesn't have to constrain my administrative privileges.

Trusting of your team's good judgment is an approach that works well for
a small group of hand-picked admins.  It doesn't scale well.


> How about the 60+ www.python.org mirrors?  Would they have to run Zope to be
> a mirror?  

Nope.  

Zope returns HTML.  Mirroring a Zope CMS can be as easy as having a cron
job copy the output of a wget -r into the appropriate htdocs directory. 

Bear in mind, that's a *content* system I'm talking about being easy to
cache. Caching content objects is easy because you have (at any given
time) a finite number of objects and a finite number of ways of
rendering each one.  

If your system needs to perform logic to render an essentially infinite
number of possible application states, caching is far trickier.  I doubt
we need (or want) a full web application running python.org.


> Copied into CVS, or can a CVS (or some other source code) repository sit
> behind it, automatically checking in updates as I make changes through the
> web?

I think you *can* store the live data in CVS, but as I recall, using a
copy was recommended.  I believe that was more of a performance issue
than a technical limitation.  If this turns out to be important, I'd be
happy to do some research on what the current thinking is.


> I'm not suggesting Zope isn't good stuff.  I'm not convinced though that it
> is the right tool for this particular job.  

Of course.  No sense putting the solution before the requirements.

On the other hand, looking at what the solution offers may suggest
requirements that are worth embracing.

> If we are looking to more
> prominently feature Python-based tools in the construction of
> www.python.org, then we should consider all options.  

Sure.

> There are many other
> Python-based content management tools out there and most, if not all of them
> are newer than Zope.

But are they newer *and* more useful than Zope?  

Also, let's not forget that newer is not necessarily more impressive to
certain types of people.  *Established* and *stable* may be far stronger
qualities to software evaluators and other fiscal-minded types.

>   If Zope was a true one-size-fits-all content
> management system I doubt these other options would have popped up.

I wonder.  Hanging out on c.l.python, I sense a real reluctance to
support Zope.  I don't know what the history is there, but something
seems to be muddying the waters besides technical considerations.

Products like Twisted may overlap (some) with Zope, but serve an
obviously different set of needs.  It makes sense that both Twisted and
Zope exist. I'm not sure at makes sense that we have so many different
templating systems.  :-)

Dylan




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