Summary

Spoke Technologies, Inc. provides the most powerful, easy-to-use platform for rapidly building websites that serve communities of people. Built on top of Zope, Spoke's platform enables users to construct a fully functional site in minutes. Using Spoke modules, site-builders can instantly add features such as articles, threaded discussions, and event calendars without writing any code.

Case Facts

A Spoke customer, working alone or in concert with other site managers, can quickly build an attractive, feature-rich site using only a web browser.

The layout and color scheme of the entire site can be selected from a choice of templates and completely customized. Features that manage dynamic content, such as threaded discussions, articles with member commentary, ratings, and event calendars are provided by objects that can be placed anywhere on the site. These content modules inherit their look and feel from the site itself, and are configured and managed via the web.

Site members can easily contribute formatted content, complete with inline images and attachments. Managers can turn such features on or off in any part of the site. Integrated full-text search, email lists, members-only areas, email-forwarding aliases, dynamic content-summary pages and other features are all easily configured with just a couple clicks of the mouse.

The Spoke Platform also includes email and usage tracking and is available either as a professionally hosted service or a software bundle. To find out more about Spoke Technologies, Inc. and its turnkey solution, go to http://www.spoke.net.

Problem

Unfortunately, the PHP language didn't provide enough abstraction to cleanly build a complex software product, a problem that became especially apparent when customers began extending their websites. Another problem was the difficulty of developing data caching systems with PHP and Apache, due to the multiple-process server architecture.

Additionally, Spoke's original platform required customers to use too many different interfaces (command line and UI) to manage their site. It was important for us to integrate these tools into a consistent UI.

Solution

The chief architect looked into building an entirely new platform from scratch. While he was researching the feature set required, he came across Zope, and recognized immediately the similarities between what he had planned and what Zope offered.

The new version of the Spoke Platform builds upon several features of Zope. The consistent property management implemented in Zope enables site-builders to easily configure and administer features of the platform. By extending the Zope Management Interface, the database content modules are configured with a couple clicks of a mouse, and managers can administer the content in a consistent manner. Integrated full-text search was built using ZCatalog, providing site-wide search of published content and member-contributed commentary.

Finally, for those webmasters who have programming experience, DTML performs very well as an extension language that can be used to quickly create custom features specifically for their site, and the Spoke development team is looking forward to supporting ZPT.