Summary

NSTP e-Media, a publishing house in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, preserves capital by completely replacing their expensive legacy Lotus Notes online newspaper publishing system with Zope core components.

Case Facts

NTSP e-Media supports four daily-edition regional newspapers and six weekly edition journals including the New Straits Times and the Malay Mail. Their online presence supports electronic copies of these newspapers. Previous iterations of their site ran on Lotus Notes and the Domino webserver system.

Problem

NSTP e-Media's Domino solution was difficult to customize and costly to keep running. Due to the complexity of the setup, all site changes large and small needed to be performed by Lotus consultants. As the publishing house's online presence matured, their software engineering staff knew that they would need a cheaper and more flexible solution to the problem of keeping their newspaper sites accessible.

The overall design had to include the following:

Simplicity and ease of use.
Stability.
Cost-effectiveness.
Features which would allow many contibutors to simultaneously modify the site in real time.
A mechanism to support online-edition advertising clients.

Solution

A Zope-based solution took about six months to fully deploy. It is a self-contained publishing and content management solution that interfaces with other NTSP e-Media sites and technologies. It makes heavy use of ZClasses and other Zope products.

The site runs on Red Hat Linux 6.X and Zope 2.X. NSTP uses DNS round robin with <a href="&dtml-BASE1;/Products/ZEO">ZEO</a> for scalability.

NSTP e-Media software developer Bakhtiar "kedai" Ahamid has these things to say about the process and how Zope has helped his company:

"We needed to publish our news online. The old site runs on Lotus Domino and costs us a lot to keep. With Zope we have full control over what we want. We were glad to chance upon Zope. ZClasses are in a class by themselves! Now, on to learn Python!"

He adds, "the Zope community is another plus. This is my first time ever to get involved in any mailing list. A lot of Zope community effort went into the site."

Zope helped NSTP e-Media replace its legacy system, meet its budget, and take steps to get its product to market quickly.