Kattare Internet Services

[russell]

Just wondering how/if we can use zope with kattare. It would probably be a big improvement over php based CMS.

Thanks!

Russell

[burnside]

Russell,

We're certainly willing to explore the possibility. What would you say is the best site to check out Zope?

[pconrad@kattare.com]

Dear Ethan,

I found this really old post about Zope... and was hoping that we could follow up on it.

Zope is a web server that underlies the Plone content management system, a CMS based on Python. I've been comparing CMSes for work I'm doing for a couple of non-profit organizations, and it appears that Plone blows all the others (Joomla, Drupal, et al) out of the water in terms of functionality.

(See http://www.plone.org for more info---especially the screencasts at http://plone.org/about/movies If you've tried working with Joomla or Drupal, and then you watch that screencast, you'll see why folks are so excited about Plone.)

However, Plone has this curious feature: the install is monolithic (it basically installs its own instance of zope, python, plone, etc.). This means that usually, the only way to run it is with a VPS account. It stubbornly refuses to run on most "cheap hosting" type accounts.

But, it so happens, I was able to install it and run it on my current Kattare.com shared hosting account (woo hoo!) because of the superior awesome (albeit non-root) command line access that you provide!

Of course, I was only able to connect via "lynx http://localhost:8080" from the ssh command line, because the port 8080 isn't accessible to the outside ( and I didn't really expect that it would be). I started up the server only briefly to see if it would work, and then shut it back down again. But this is much further than I got with any other hosting account, short of one with root access.

My question is whether you'd consider supporting this "for real", perhaps with a mod_rewrite entry (similar to that described at this web page):

http://wiki.zope.org/zope2/ZopeAndApache

If you are willing to try this out just as an experiment (with no commitment on your part to continue to support it if you decide it isn't feasible from a technical or business standpoint), let me know, and we can give it a try.

[burnside]

Phillip,

We could definitely support it in this manner with mod_proxy/mod_rewrite. We don't have a problem with folks running daemons, we're already running tomcat daemons for most everyone. We do have to either bump you up to a corp plus, or charge a resources surcharge (usually $10/mo) for the extra ram/cpu since you're already running tomcat.

Your account on our systems has already been assigned a port range on your server. (We do reserve 8080 for internal use, so each account has a 10000+ range of 10 ports.) You can ping support@kattare.com and they'll be able to tell you what it is, or you can examine your existing conf/server.xml to get an idea of what it is. You just want to pick a port that is in your range and is not already in use by tomcat, then we can plug in the custom proxy/rewrite rules for you.

We're still hoping "someday" to be able to support Zope like we support tomcat, apache, resin, etc... with a custom installer. In the meantime, anyone that wants to do their own installation within their account is welcome to do so!

Cheers,

~Ethan B.