I'm so new to Zope that I can barely even spell it.
But I'm about to spend some time and effort getting proficient with something
that enables dynamic, database-connected (and database-updateable) content on
web sites so I can sell it to clients, and the appeal of Zope is overwhelming in
this arena.
I am a very proficient PowerBuilder programmer, but
Sybase's offerings are cumbersome and somewhat expensive. I am well versed in
many of Microsoft's products, particularly VBA for its Office products, but I
worry greatly about using anything from Microsoft because it's hard to know when
I'll run into a "gotcha" that I'll curse myself for later on. Cold Fusion and
other products seem a happy medium but the CF server piece is about $5k, and
some others are more expensive.
But here's what worries me about Zope: it looks I
will do a whole lot of typing and get caught up in the syntax and repetitive
nature of things like and and
. OK, so it's not made for the faint-of-heart at this
point - I can handle that. But I also am not an HTML maven, and it looks like I
need to have full HTML expertise to make this work also. GUI tools take the
drudge out of something and this is a
heading pretty well, but I don't see how to get out of this stuff
with Zope, especially since it looks like everything is stored internally in a
data file that I can't access from the outside.
Am I correct? Or is there help on the horizon for
those of us who have no graphic design skills and actually
believe there's a place for GUI-based tools?
Thanks for any light you might shed on this subject
for me -
-Frank
