Website for local university

I'm involved in a project to redevelop a website for a University's 
Business School.

We've almost confirmed the decision to use Zope, and possibly Plone as a 
starting point.  The internal IT staff are very excited about Open 
Source and Zope, although they have zero in-house experience.

So I'm wondering if anyone can provide some guidance and maybe lend some 
experience from past projects.  Initially, we are only going to be 
building their public website.  No Intranet, no e-learning for the 
students as this is currently handled campus-wide by Blackboard.  The 
project is conceptually quite simple: A public site maintained by 30 or 
so departmental secretaries.  The current site is maintained by the same 
group of people and Dreamweaver.

I'm torn between using Plone as a starting point or simply Zope with the 
CMF.

Plone is nice, but would have to be tweaked significantly.  The 
navigation and design would require a major rework, but that's not the 
part that concerns me.  Plone is really geared towards a portal 
environment where all the site's visitors are potentially contributors. 
  In the case of this project, we have only a handful (maybe 30) 
contributors, but a whole world of visitors.

Does anyone have any experience in "transforming" Plone to better 
support this sort of environment?

If I start with a naked install of Zope and the CMF I'm scared that the 
work required to build in the approval workflow, visual editors, etc may 
be daunting.

My experience with Zope is very limited - lots of reading and some work 
with tutorials.  I'm really hoping that some kind soul out there can 
lend a hand.  Any kind souls out there?  Any similar projects out there 
that we could  use as a starting point?  Any tips at all?

As a bit of an aside, does anyone know of a Zope application that is 
geared towards this scenario?  Almost all of the applications I've seen 
  (eg, Plone) are geared towards the Portal situation.  I'm baffled that 
there aren't polished applications to facilitate the maintenance of 
public sites.  I have to believe that there are more projects of the 
"public site" nature than there are of the "portal" nature!  Can anyone 
shed light on this for me?  What am I missing?

- Dan




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