By killes@www.drop.org on

Today, I have been approached to help migrate a Zope based system to Drupal. After removing some superfluous contrib-modules, the main task was to transplant the 660 existing users to the new system. After some hassles it was possible to extract the user data in xml format.
With only minimal effort a script was written and the site had 660 new users.

The site in question is the drupalized my.gnus.org site. It caters for the Gnus user community. Gnus is a news- and mailreader that runs in Emacs and XEmacs.

A quote from the my.gnus.org community about my.gnus.org and Drupal:

«As it's a page dealing with the news and mail client whose features are a superset of those other clients offer we were looking for a CMS which offers us the same.»

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

Hi, it would be very intereting to read about your reasons to change from zope to drupal, please give details about what sucks on zope!

Please note: I am not interested in holy wars, I just want to know, what people think about the software they were using a lot!

Have a nice day!
L.

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

I've used several systems including Durpal and Zope. My comparision is not completely fair as I used (and really liked) Zope in its early days. What I espically liked, (as a Macintosh based developer) was the ability to edit all the content through the web. Zope was my first step away from Userland's Frontier when it went from a free product with an open community to a $$$$ product with a closed community. I liked very much the object database and Python is an intuitive language.


I moved away from Zope primarally because of the object database. As my systems changed and with OS X now providing me a handful of machines with *nix on them I liked not having to sync a single large file (Zope's database) across several sites. And while Zope's tools have gronw considerably, I also appreciate the ability to keep the content seperate from the code and having a SQL based database for most of my data as I move to ever increasing complexity of data models in the information I'm publishing to the web.

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

To be fair, there is a file system based storage system for Zope -http://dirstorage.sourceforge.net/. It sounds great, just store the discrete data objects on the file system, very practical with modern filesystems and transparent to access and maintain.

I think Zope really is far advanced of so many other solutions, but it is complex and doesn't fit in with the tech we (some gov't, health system and creative projects) are using otherwise, and Drupal seems very easy to get started in customizing, so we are 99.95% going with Drupal (it sure is hard to decide, too many great choices each with their distinct advantages).

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

archetypes are supporting rdbms as storage. as does "ape".

dries’s picture

dries commented

Another key difference is that there are a significant number of Zope companies and consultants, Zope books, Zope trainings, and so on. From an architectural point of view, Zope is more "plaftorm" (think: "application server") than Drupal is. Typically, Zope-driven sites (such as those using CMF or Plone) are less dynamic and community-driven than Drupal sites are.

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

please define dynamic - and sorry it doesn't depend on the system you're using, it depends on your community, target group, marketing etc.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

I wasn't involved with the decision to change from Zope to Drupal. But one of the people at my.gnus.org must have been very fed up with Zope.

--
Drupal services
My Drupal services

rsocha’s picture

rsocha commented

Greetings, I'm Robin of my.gnus.org.

Our primary reasons for switching were:

Insufficient hardware.
Zope is a real memory hog, and I mean real. We're running OpenBSD on an oldish Pentium with 256MB RAM, and Zope was eating up between 100 and 180MB. At once. Yes, we did ask Zope and Plone developers, and they did take a look, but it just wouldn't work. That was the primary reason, because the Zope server crashed once a day due to memory exhaustion. Not Zope's fault, mind you, but enough to make us switch.
Maintainability
Again, not Plone's fault, but we were stuck with a Plone installation that even a Plone developer couldn't upgrade. When we tried exporting the old DB and transfer it to a new machine, there were far too many broken dependencies for us to finally bother, simply because we are few and none of us really speak Python or knew the necessary Zope intricacies.
Support
my.gnus.org is an volunteer project, and we are only 10 people. When we needed support for Zope and Plone, three good people showed up, but even they couldn't manage the server. Now, most of us speak PHP at least to a lesser extent, and that's a real difference.

Now that I've said what I wanted to get off my chest about Zope, let's say a few words about Drupal.

Features
Drupal has all the features we need. And I mean exactly the ones.
Support
Luckily for us, several Gnus users including the magnificent killes know Drupal. Do I need to say more?

So there. Not Zope's fault, but Drupal simply delivers and the site looks really promising now, I think.

Therefore: A great big THANK YOU! to all Drupal developers, and to killes in particular. Thanks!

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented

What are the primary differences in features/functionality between Plone (Zope) and Drupal?