First a quick introduction. I'm Paul Everitt, co-founder of Digital Creations, the people that make Zope. I just came across this thread and would like to make some observations and offer help, if that's appropriate.

Some background. I'm the Mozilla fanatic here. We started a project called Zope Studio to design a next-generation management screen for Zope based on Mozilla. As I told Mitchell Baker in a note recently, unfortunately that project didn't make it. We went way over budget before Mozilla got stable enough for development, and at the same time Komodo from ActiveState taught us that we're not a client-side tools company. :^)

Regarding some things from this thread:

1) It's true that Zope doesn't come out of the box ready to solve the problem. Rather, it's a platform for solving the problem. It's a little like the relationship between Gecko and a Mozilla browser. Fortunately there are a lot of components for Zope that can add value, one of which I'll mention in a moment.

2) Regarding James' comment about the hassle of the add-on product for hosting, he's correct. Fortunately Zope 2.3 (a2 came out this week, final release planned this month) includes this functionality, along with a lot of other long-overdue stuff).

3) Regarding Gerv's comment about "perhaps getting a Zope guru will pitch in", we're willing to go a little further and significantly pitch in.

4) One thing this thread has shown is that mozilla.org and the documentation folks have what is known as a content management problem. This requires, IMO, a content management system. I feel that mozilla.org shouldn't write a CMS, since that's not the mission of the company. Rather, they should partner with a CMS, preferably an Open Source CMS. We happen to have a content management framework we'll be releasing that's Open Source. I realize this logic is self-serving, but I feel it's also sound.

5) At a glance, here are some of the things that you'll need for a new mozilla.org that are things we have experience in and software for:

• Membership. You need a system where people can sign up for accounts, remember lost passwords, get expired after inactivity, get low-privilege roles that can be expanded by higher ups, etc.
• Approval. For some areas of the site you need simple workflows.
• Navigation (searching, site maps, what's new, glossaries, categories, etc.) This is one of the most important parts of the site. You need efficient, effective ways to organize a huge mound of diverse, heterogeneous content. This organization needs to then be presented to people in an effective way for browsing, searching, and navigating the site.
• Content objects. There are different flavors of content on the site. (In Zope, we treat all three tiers as content, so presentation, logic, and data all get the same business rules.) These content objects might have multiple input formats and multiple output formats. You might have business rules to enforce on them (such as the document can't be updated if it isn't well-formed with a valid category included). We have a LOT to say on this subject, but also give a platform for mozilla.org to extend our basics.
• Security. When you start talking about a site with thousands of contributors...I'll just leave it at that. :^)
• Site-wide style. This might be the second biggest challenge for mozilla.org, after organization/navigation/structure. How do you efficiently impose one or a few consistent presentations on a whole pile of content, while leaving room for context-sensitivity?
• Dynamic components. One thing shared by all content management systems is that, to some extent, pages are rendered dynamically. Thus logic can be used at run-time. Even better, you can tap into pre-defined logic (components) such as polls, threaded discussions, Bugzilla, etc.
• Low admin burden. How do you do all this with essentially a volunteer staff? The system should promote safe delegation of control.

Ultimately we're interested in contributing in a substantial way. However, as mentioned a few times, the first step for any of the various directions mozilla.org might choose is to line up the prototypes.

I've been in the Python community a LONG time, and now in the Zope community. One thing I've learned is there's a big difference between what might be and what is. Thus I'm willing to get Digital Creations to help on producing a pilot site.

However, we're bandwidth constrained, getting ready for LinuxWorld Expo at the end of the month. (If anybody is going to be there and would like to see a killer demo of what mozilla.org could be, drop by the booth :^) Thus I'd like to just work with a small group of people in private email exchanges, then let them present the work back to the group.

For what it's worth, as an example of how a content management system might work, I posted this exact text in a page at Zope.org. We have a text format called "structured text" that can be rendered into HTML, DocBook, and soon PDF. Zope.org is running an old version of our content management story.