[Zope] Am I getting the idea correctly?

[Frank Isaacs]

I'm so new to Zope that I can barely even spell it. But I'm about to spend some time and effort getting proficient with something that enables dynamic, database-connected (and database-updateable) content on web sites so I can sell it to clients, and the appeal of Zope is overwhelming in this arena.   I am a very proficient PowerBuilder programmer, but Sybase's offerings are cumbersome and somewhat expensive. I am well versed in many of Microsoft's products, particularly VBA for its Office products, but I worry greatly about using anything from Microsoft because it's hard to know when I'll run into a "gotcha" that I'll curse myself for later on. Cold Fusion and other products seem a happy medium but the CF server piece is about $5k, and some others are more expensive.   But here's what worries me about Zope: it looks I will do a whole lot of typing and get caught up in the syntax and repetitive nature of things like <dtml-var ------> and <dtml-this -----> and <dtml-that ----- >. OK, so it's not made for the faint-of-heart at this point - I can handle that. But I also am not an HTML maven, and it looks like I need to have full HTML expertise to make this work also. GUI tools take the drudge out of <a href="something">something and <h2>this is a heading</h2> pretty well, but I don't see how to get out of this stuff with Zope, especially since it looks like everything is stored internally in a data file that I can't access from the outside.   Am I correct? Or is there help on the horizon for those of us who have no graphic design skills and <shudder> actually believe there's a place for GUI-based tools?   Thanks for any light you might shed on this subject for me -   -Frank