Zope at the Crossroads
tl;dr
After twelve years of active development, spawning multiple web frameworks, libraries, and applications, the Zope development community is at something of a crossroads.
Bias alert
I've been following / using Zope since I heard Paul Everitt announce its open-sourcing at the 1998 International Python Conference.
I worked for Digital Creations / Zope Corporation from March, 2000 through May, 2005, and have derive a significant portion of my consulting income from Zope-based deployments for my clients to this date.
Looking back
In the twelve years and more since Zope was open sourced, the project has accomplished a lot of interesting and valuable goals:
The Zope Object Database (ZODB) is a battle- hardened, native persistence implementation for Python applications.
The Zope 2 application server is a mature, stable, and maintained platform for delivering content-centric websites.
The Zope Toolkit (ZTK) is a set of well-maintained, extensively tested, reusable libraries, spun out of the Zope3 development effort (since discontinued).
The Grok web framework sits atop the ZTK and provides a platform for building "Zope-like" web applications.
We have also seen a number of disappointments in those twelve years:
The attempt to re-invent Zope2 de novo as Zope3 turned out to be a major mistake, both in branding terms and as a new platform for web applications. On the other hand, the core technologies from Zope3 are now broken out into the ZTK.