I have been using ZOPE (mostly with CMF/Plone) for a couple years now. MY recolleciton of the initial leraning curve, was hours reading through source code, newsgroups, web site, outdated garbage, days long marathons of coffee, beer and very little sleep.
After about 2 weeks of this horrible mindnumbing headache - the eureka moment hit, and it has proven itself to be a fairly robust application server environment, and has really delivered for me in terms of being able to quickle create web apps. I would say though the question of Zope is not a question of implementation language - it is it's own thing. I think a lot of the talk of adding typing to python has emerged from the Zope camp. So the question you should ask yourself, not do I want to use python or php - it's more do I want to use Zope? Zope is pretty well supported and seems to have a good bit of momentum (compared to other python based app servers) My experince is that the learning curve is steep, and the path is heavily littered with debris. But, once the initial curve is passed - the results seems almost magical (at least compared to other app server environments I have worked with) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
