Summary

IDG Now! implemented a Zope-based news publishing system ahead of schedule for a leading Brazilian news site.

Case Facts

Brazil-based Hiperl�gica needed to implement a news publishing system for IDG Now!, the Brazilian tech news web site of IDG. It is the most popular web site of its kind in Brazil, and Brazil was the 6th largest IT market in the world in 1997. Hiperl�gica has been designing high-profile web sites since the early days of the web in Brazil.

Problem

Hiperl�gica faced the traditional issues of creating a powerful system with a tight deadline.

Solution

Luciano Ramalho and Jose Octavio from Hiperl�gica chose Zope as the platform for their news publishing system. They found that Zope provided easy solutions to most of the problems web developers face.

With simple re-use from one from one part of the site to another, they actually managed to deliver several modules one week before the deadline. Starting on April 8th all editors were already using the system to publish their stories. During the week before the April 15th deadline Hiperl�gica made minor adjustments responding to user feedback, then implemented a few features not in the original requirements. All of that was very easy too. The last module was fully operational on April 15th, generating around 40 new pages daily.

The Hiperl�gica team has had the opportunity to work with high-end products such as NetDynamics, Silverstream and the deceased Netscape Publishing System. Based on their experience in this project, they feel that none of them comes near Zope in supporting websites which are a mixture of structured and unstructured content, which is the majority of sites. They also saw that Zope lets you choose the level of automation to implement in different parts of the site, taking into account the frequency of updates, the skill level of the people responsible for updating and the complexity of the updates. Customers then are delivered a highly cost-effective solution.

Since this project completed, IDG hired Hiperl�gica to deploy all of their Brazil sites atop the Zope-based solution, starting with PC World.