For those that tried Zope when you had to use DTML for scripting I know you likely thought it was impossible. The Zope Page Template (ZPT) system now lets you use standard web-interface design tools to build your site. See the link http://www.plone.org/about/sites for the flexibility available in Plone, though you can run it right out of the box. Either way you maintain the power of the underlying CMS engine. On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 09:58, Robin Carriere wrote: > Tim, can you comment - I'm not familiar with the db backend used in > zope. It is an object oriented DB? Yes it is. > How easy/hard is it to retrieve data from the DB? I guess this is a relative question? <g> > Are there interfaces available to get a the data > easily (I'm thinking along the lines of interfaces to accomplish this - > ie. phpMyAdmin, Mysql GUI). I couldn't find anything when I was playing > with Plone. There is the Zope Management Interface Find function. > While I probably would rarely use direct access for > anything - I like looking at how tables, etc are designed to get a > better idea of how the system works. This is an object database so there aren't tables. There is a hierarchy of objects that contain data attributes. Content objects are easily 'related' via the keywords and relationship attributes of the Dublin Core implementation in Plone. The cataloging (indexing) is maintained automatically as you select/create the keywords for your document/image/textfile etc. So you must think a little different when wanting to retrieve data outside the standard interface. Actually from an end user POV you think a lot less because so much is automatic. There is the http://demo.plone.org site where you can play with it without having to install your own copy. You can play with the publishing process there. Cheers, Tim