Hello Everyone,

Thanks for taking an interest in Workalike.

What would you want to see in a Frontier replacement? What platforms need to be supported (I am thinking Mac, Windows, Linux)?

There are a lot of different languages we could choose to do such an implementation in, and a lot of different ways to approach the problem.

Let's talk about it - this bboard is the place to do

-- Patrick Giagnocavo (a222@redrose.net), April 26, 2000

Answers

I have observed Frontiers progress since 1995, and have used it a little for personal purposes for both Mac system scripting and web work. Professionally, I have Frontier and Zope at the top of my watch list for web content management systems. I believe that my firm will be using some form of real CMS within the next six months.

While I have used Zope only a very little, I have been impressed. Additionally, I have been doing most of my reccent web programming in Python which I find to be an excellent language.

Within this context, I believe that any project to create a similar system to Frontier, should focus on adding some features of Frontier to Zope. Zope has much in common with Frontier already:

* An object DB * Python is similar to Usertalk * Separate interfaces for content managers and programmers. * Etc.

I believe that is only lacking a few major features:

* No real GUI, and the web interface is not as polished as Manila. Of course, there seems to be a lot of work right now on ZopeFish to make Pike work with Zope.

* Some cool features like Frontiers ablity to create links to items in quotes on the fly are missing.

* Zope is a nebulus open source system, without a strong dictator like Linus (or Winer for that matter) leading the way.

On the pluses:

* Zope has strong SQL links.

* Python is much better documented than Usertalk.

* Zope runs on unix flavors today.

Enough random thoughts.

-- Lee A. Joramo ljoramo@nickads.com The Nickel Want Ads www.nickads.com Internet Manager 97

-- Lee Joramo (lee.lists@joramo.com), April 27, 2000.