Zope - powerful web application server
Zope is an open source application server for building content management systems, intranets, portals, and custom applications. The Zope community consists of hundreds of companies and thousands of developers all over the world, working on building the platform and Zope applications. Zope is written in Python, a highly-productive, object-oriented scripting language.
For any price on any platform there is no more flexible solution than Zope.
-- Theodore E. Patrick, CIO Indigo Networks
Zope is a Python-based application server that has been developed by Zope Corporation. Zope Corporation released the sources in the late 90s as open-source and at this time Zope and its "community":http://www.zope.org grew and is the most important application server besides the J2EE systems like JBoss. Zope has some unique features like its own object-oriented database (ZODB) and concepts like acquisition that all objects in the ZODB hierarchy to acquire properties from parent objects.
Built-in techniques to build a web-site are e.g. PythonScripts (embeded Python), DTML (Document Markup Language), ZPT (Zope Page Template), ZSQL methods (specify SQL queries as objects). Zope contains a component called ZCatalog which is responsible for indexing content (powerful full-text indexing is available).
The Content Management Framework (CMF) is a layer on top of Zope and a framework to build your own portal sites. Some of the provided services are registration, member data handling and skin tools. As the name "framework" implies, CMF is not supposed to be an out-of-the-box portal and content management system (CMS), but a very generic tool that allows you to build your own site and re-use the tools provided by the CMF.
Plone is built on top of CMF, and provides an out-of-the-box CMS that is powerful, flexible and easy to use.
