December 13, 2002

Zope and Plone

I've been planning on playing with Zope for a while now. I went to the Zope.org page to download Zope. There aren't any pre-compiled binaries for my Mac OS X laptop, so I downloaded the source. (Yes, I'm enough of a nerd to compile apps when I need to.) But as I started the process I ran into some roadblocks. Zope 2.6.0 requires Python 2.1. My Mac OS X 10.2.2 has Python 2.2. I'm not really keen on compiling another version of Python just to run Zope. After some poking around on the Zope site, I found out that Python 2.2 support is a proposed feature for Zope 2.7.

After this discovery, I thought I'd surf over to Plone.org. Plone is a CMS that runs on top of Zope. Turns out they have a pre-compiled binary of Plone for Mac OS X! All the required components are all in a package, so installation was a one-click affair. Once the parts are installed (in Applications > Plone), open the Zope Controller. You'll need to change the Server User (under the Environment tab) to a username on your machine. Then, quit the Controller and start it again (I think you need to do this...). Click the lock at the bottom to allow you to start the server. Start the server. Then go to the URL provided in the docs.

The Plone binary included Python 2.1 and Zope 2.6 (I think). Maybe later I'll play with the Zope provided.

So I have it up and running. I'll post a report on what else I find later.