[Zope] Zope question

[Dylan Reinhardt]

On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 21:15, Damian Maitland wrote:
> Hello im interested in Zope but i need to know if it can do what i
> need it to do.
> I would like to build a community portal for my area, a portal similar
> to http://www.gopbi.com.
>  
> Also i would like ot know if it can be installed on a Cobalt Raq 4R
> server. 
>  
> Thanks in advvance.
> Damie
> 

Zope is great for building community portals.  Be sure to look into
Plone too.

Zope/Plone *can* be installed on a Raq, but only from source and not
without some pain.  To make a long story short, you need to be willing
to break and/or stop using the marvelous web management UI that
constitutes the Raq's most significant selling point.

There are a couple howtos for Raq usage on the *old* Zope site that
haven't yet gotten migrated forward to the new site:

http://old.zope.org/Members/dylanr/cobalt_raq
http://old.zope.org/Members/andy/raqHosting

The first one is old... it covers Zope 2.5.1 and aspects of it may not
apply to 2.6.1 or later, particularly if you use an instance home
setup.  I haven't gotten around to updating it... sorry.

The second one claims to have a recipe that doesn't break the management
ui, but I'm not sure that's going to work... IIRC, you'll need to stop
using the UI to add virtual hosts in order to keep from overwriting your
manual changes.  You can still use it for the mail and admin stuff.

The bottom line is that the Raq is not, in my experience, a great
solution for Zope (nor really for much of anything else).  It's poorly
maintained and highly inflexible.  RPM software installation is pretty
thoroughly hosed so you have to either use Sun's official
patches/packages or hand-roll everything.

If you haven't already paid for the Raq, I'd look into "virtual" colo
(UML based) instead of using a Raq.  Or if you just need Zope hosting,
ask around... there are several people here who can help with that.

HTH,

Dylan