kbperry: >1) Is Zope/Plone overkill for this type of project? No, Plone is an excellent CMS for your purpose.
>2) Why use Plone vs. straight up Zope? Plone is an out-of-the-box CMS for non-technical editors, Zope is the underlying infrastructure for developers. >3) Is there a way to get over the steep learning curves (that I have >read about)? There is a steep learning curve when you need to develop custom content types, application code, integrate other databases and so on. But when all you want is a CMS for a community-type website, Plone is fine. I recommend this book, it probably contains all you need to know: http://plone.org/documentation/manual/definitive-guide (it's available as web pages and on dead tree as well) -- René Pijlman -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list