Questions about Zope

I suppose the crux of this posting is: tell me about
Zope, but to narrow down what I'm trying to find out
let me first explain what I'm doing and then pose some
more specific questions.

We are in the process of building a web-site
automation tool that will allow users to go to our
site and create their own website that will be hosted
on our server. In addition to a bunch of static HTML
pages, their site will be able to include management
of mailing lists, some calendaring function, probably
a discussion forum.

So, we're looking at using a CMS for administering all
of these small sites. 

Zope/CMF seems like a pretty good option given its
extensibility (since we're in the prototyping stage at
this point and are still working out features), its
security model, and the fact that it's scalable.
Moreover, it's my impression that many of the features
we'll want to provide (such as mailing list
management) have Python implementations that we could
easily deploy. Furthermore, I've read that it's fairly
easy to get started with Zope.

The downside of Zope seems to be its learning curve:
although it's allegedly easy to start off with Zope,
several things I've read have indicated that the curve
slopes gently at first and gets much steeper later on.


My questions then:
--Can anyone direct me to a case-study anywhere on the
net (or if you have one of your own :) ) that would
step me through the easy and hard parts of a Zope/CMF
deployment? 
--Basically, I don't know what lies in store for us if
we choose Zope/CMF: when does the learning curve get
steep and how steep are we talking? I mean is it that
getting the basic site up takes a day, but then when
you want to use the clustering features it'll take you
3 weeks to get them right?
--Also, if I wanted to consider other open source
low-level content management frameworks, what might I
consider? Is Midgard the PHP answer to Zope/CMF? Are
there others?

Thank you very much for your help.

Francis 


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
--
http://cms-list.org/
please trim your posts.