I've had a feeling, that the Zope Community is recently coming to more activity for some months now. I was thinking about writing a Blog Entry about it, but did not dare somehow. Then I read Martijns great Blog Entry about the fourth Zope Age and now I do. Since I am still a big StarWars Fan, the "fourth Zope age" made me think about Star Wars Episode IV, which was later named "Star Wars - A new Hope". Is this a good sign? Yes methinks it is.

I felt that Zope - in the last years - was stagnating. There are reasons for this, and I do strongly agree with Martijn about the reasons and what we should do about it. It seems that Zope is technologically getting more open (e.g. repoze ),  easier to start with (i.e. Grok ) and we really need to open our community and spread the word about it. It seems that within the Zope Community many people are sort of focused inwards. This is something that - in my opinion - needs to change as well.

The lessons learned from being present at both Cebit and Systems Trade Fare Shows here in Germany is, that that we do in fact have an interesting technology and a very professional community. However, Zope is more of an Infrastructure Product which is rather difficult to "sell". That is much easier with Plone, Silva or Grok and we need to figure out how to optimally promote these altogether within the Zope Context. Many People at the booths did not know about any of the stuff we were presenting, some had heard about Plone. They did know Joomla! or Typo3, though.

At the moment, there are mostly PHP or Java based CMS solutions with different directions: the smaller and more dynamic ones are PHP and the larger, static stuff goes for Java. And that's what people are recommending. However I think, that this does not make too much sense. Why? From my experience, Web-Applications like Intranets or Websites tend to grow rapidly when they are successful. So if you start with something rather simple (like Joomla!) you may end up in 1-2 years with a technical Infrastructure that cannot cope with your growing Requirements. But that kind of scalability is something that Projects like Plone or Grok inherit from the Platform and Language they are based on: Python and Zope.

So we should go out and tell the world, that Zope based solutions can be quite dynamic since they depend on Python but that they are stable, mature, scalable and extendable since they are based on the Zope Platform. Phew, this Post has become much longer than intended - I wonder how many people read it up to here...