Zope is a leading Open Source Application Server and Content Management Framework, specializing in content management solutions, portal content management, and custom applications. Since Zope Corporation introduced Zope Content Management System as an open source product in 1998, it has become the platform of choice for content publishers, managers, and application developers.
As an open source product, Zope Content Management Framework comes with complete source code and no software licensing fees. Zope is managed by the global Zope community, with thousands of developers and companies participating worldwide. Zope enables teams to collaborate in the creation and management of dynamic web-based business applications such as intranets and portals.
Zope web application server and its Content Management Framework serve a base for one of the world's most popular and powerful Content Management System - Plone. Zope outstanding features and abilities provide Plone with powerful underlying framework and make it easy to customize and expand Plone.
Advantages of Zope
Zope allows very rapid, object orientated development of web applications or sites. It is an Open Source project, meaning that the underlying code of the software is freely available. There are no licensing cost associated with Zope, thus reducing the total cost of deploying a project.
Zope is written (and extensible with) Python, a powerful object-oriented programming language, with performance sensitive components written in C.
Unlike common file-based Web templating systems such as ASP or PHP, Zope is a highly object-oriented Web development platform that covers much more of the problem domain for Web application developers. It provides clean separation of data, logic and presentation, an extensible set of built-in objects and a powerful integrated security model. The Zope infrastructure relieves the developer of most of the onerous details of Web application development such as data persistence, data integrity and access control, allowing you to focus on the problem at hand.
What sets Zope apart from other application servers is that it was designed from the start to be tightly coupled not only with the Web object model, but also the Web development model. Today's successful Web applications require the articipation of many people across an organization that have different areas of expertise. Zope is specifically designed to accommodate this model, allowing site managers to safely delegate control to design experts, database experts and content managers.
Zope is a next-generation Web application server and content management system. Although it can be used simply as a traditional Web server, Zope is also a powerful framework for allowing many people to collaborate on the development of websites and dynamic Web applications.
While it has built-in object and relational databases, Zope easily integrates with standard databases like Oracle and MySQL and can be extended using hundreds of third-party products or by using Python, a powerful and easy-to-use open source scripting language. Zope itself is open source and is written in Python
More information, including the Zope source code, is available at http://www.zope.org.
Learn more about Zope Object DataBase (ZODB) and open source replicated storage for this database (ZRS).
Quintagroup's Involvement with Zope
Quintagroup have been using Zope for its web projects for the past six years, and it now forms the foundation of most of our work. During this time we have been actively working with the Zope Community to further the development with Zope / Plone CMS, and in particular have been involved in the development of Plone Usability Enhancements, Plone Features Development, Plone testing and bugfixing. We offer Zope Development services and Zope hosting.