Zope HOWTO

This page documents how to use Zope with Funtoo Experimental, which currently has good Zope support thanks to Progress Overlay Python integration.

About Zope

Zope is an Open Source application server framework written in Python. It has an interesting history which you should familiarize yourself with before starting Zope development, as it contains several interesting twists and turns.

Zope History

There are two versions of Zope, Zope 2 and Zope 3. One might assume that Zope 3 is the version that people should use by default, but this is not the case. Most Zope-based projects continue to use Zope 2. Zope 3 was an attempt to redesign Zope 2 from scratch, and was completely different from Zope 2, but it was not adopted by the community.

There is also something called Five (named because it is "2 + 3") that backports many of the new features of Zope 3 into the Zope 2 framework. Several projects will use Zope 2 plus Five in order to use some of the newer features in Zope. Five was merged into mainline Zope 2 in early 2010, and first appeared in Zope 2.8.

You can learn more about the history of Zope 2, 3 and Five in the Five README.

To make things even more interesting, work on Zope 4 is under way, and it will be based on 2.13 rather than 3.x. It includes a number of incompatible changes with prior versions.

This HOWTO targets Zope 2.13, which includes Five. It is typically the version you should be using for new Zope projects.

Zope Resources

• The Zope 2 Book
• docs.zope.org

First Steps

First, you will need to use Funtoo Experimental and emerge Zope:

# emerge --jobs=10 zope

Currently, to get this to complete successfully, you must add the following line to /etc/portage/package.use:

>=net-zope/namespaces-zope-0 Shared Products Shared.DC zope.app

Zope is now installed.

First Project

Zope should be used by a regular user account, not as the root user.

The first step in using Zope is to ensure that you are using a regular user account. Create a new directory called zope_test:

$ cd
$ mkdir zope_test

Now, enter the directory, and create an "instance", which is a set of files and directories that are used to contain a Zope project:

$ cd zope_test
$ /usr/lib/zope-2.13/bin/mkzopeinstance

You will see the following output, and will be prompted to answer a few questions:

Please choose a directory in which you'd like to install
Zope "instance home" files such as database files, configuration
files, etc.

Directory: instance
Please choose a username and password for the initial user.
These will be the credentials you use to initially manage
your new Zope instance.

Username: admin
Password: ****
Verify password: **** 

Now, we will start our Zope instance:

$ cd instance
$ bin/runzope

ZMI

Now that Zope is running, you can visit localhost:8080 in your Web browser. You will see a nice introductory page to Zope.

If you now go to the localhost:8080/manage URL, you will be prompted to log in. Enter the username and password you specified. You are now logged in to the ZMI (Zope Management Interface.)