I originially starting working with Zope in 2002 as it was an interesting melding of web application and database in a thru-the-web (TTW) way. I can't say I ever became the Python person that Zope encouraged. In fact, I think Zope was Python's original "killer-app" and making Python 1.x & 2.x (the original Monty Python-based Python motif) was largely driven by Zope usage. I loved the object database (it became ZEO I think) and the whole idea of ZClasses (which I only began to get into when I was pulled away to being a full-time sysadmin and couldn't play as much).

Sadly, Zope was the underlying framework for Plone and became its dominant product to the exclusion of pretty much all others, which certainly happens. Honestly, I don't think most Plone installers, users, or admins really see Zope as anything more than an inner mechanism of Plone these days, if they see it at all. Plone never used ZClasses, so that functionality was negected and ultimately removed. I don't know what Jim Fulton, the "father" of Zope, thinks of all of this.

Zope was never forked away from its alteration and subsuming into Plone, as so many brainchilds that leave their original nests have been able to do. Git wasn't much of a thing at the time when Zope was interesting as a concept, so the idea of forking was not so prevalent in my mind. Also, I don't know that Zope community governance was seperate enough from the growing Plone community and could make any independent choices to continue to develop the TTW object model and python 2.x.

For me, the philosophy of Zope present in the 2.5-2.7 versions are the high point of the Zope concept and is best seen in the number of "products" available at that time (Plone being just one of many dozens), especially in the Debian/Ubuntu distributions of the time. It was still a monolithic web application system where you could create some interesting applications.

Although I liked the paradigm, I am not a big fan of using databases beyond flat-files, so I use FosWiki instead of the groovy Zope-based ZWiki these days. Although I sometimes work with PHP these days for webbish apps, I try to avoid the use of a relational database behind it. I really am not much of an object-person unless that use is truly compelling.

Zope was a very cool concept that could easily be implemented on Debian/Ubuntu in the naughts. It didn't really make it to today with its original concept intact.