Thank you. My impression of Zope in the past has been that it does what I need, along with 10,000 other things I don't (built in WebDAV server?!), but clearly I owe it another chance. I've been initially attracted to mod_python because of its raw simplicity and its apparent similarity to mod_php and mod_perl, which I am familiar with. I'll give Zope a try.
I am moving my band's website from an antiquated and horrible PHPNuke site to a Python-based site, and so have done quite a bit of research about this (though I never considered myself a PHP expert). Here's what I've come up with...
Zope is excellent (especially with Plone), but if you are not building applications that require lots of levels of access and permissions and collaborations, as well as the 10,000 other things you speak of, you probably would like something simpler than Zope, such as CherryPy or Quixote. Both are excellent and light-weight frameworks that give you session support and easy access to request variables (as well as full access to the entire Python language). Conceptually, the two are very close, but I am slightly more biased towards CherryPy lately. Quixote has better built in form support, but now that I've discovered FormKit, this seems to becoming a non-issue. Also, both are pure Python so should run anywhere Python does (though Quixote has a C extension, it will fallback to a somewhat slower pure-Python version if your platform cannot compile the extension).
There are other good frameworks out there, like Nevow and Webware, but have a somewhat larger conceptual overhead which doesn't rest as easy with me. You'll also want to probably look at some of the templating kits, of which Cheetah and/or ElementTree work best for me. (Well, ElementTree isn't exactly a templating kit - it's a general-purpose XML tookit - but it is easily used for templating.)
General Python web programming: http://www.python.org/topics/web/
Frameworks/toolkits: [CherryPy] http://www.cherrypy.org/ [Quixote] http://www.mems-exchange.com/software/quixote [FormKit] http://dalchemy.com/opensource/formkit/ [Cheetah] http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/ [ElementTree] http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm [Nevow] http://nevow.com/ [Webware] http://www.webwareforpython.org/
For more comparisons of some of the various frameworks: [PyWebOff] http://pyre.third-bit.com/pyweb/index.html [Python Web Shootout (older)] http://www.colorstudy.com/docs/shootout.html
-- Soraia: http://www.soraia.com
-- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
