Installation of Zope is pretty straightforward and should be possible with the documentation at their website. One useful thing is to add the option

-P80

to the start-file of Zope, so as to set it to the standard html-port. Of course this means disabling a possibly present Apache.

If you want to get along with an installed apache, you have to put something like

<VirtualHost 128.178.8.77>
       ServerName lcmpc10.epfl.ch
       RewriteEngine On
       RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin - [L]
       RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://localhost:8080/VirtualHostBase/http/lcmpc10.epfl.ch:80/$1] [P]
</VirtualHost>

In your /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf-file and then restart Apache with 'service apache restart'. If you are on a Debian-system (lucky you), the file is called /etc/apache/httpd.conf and the port-number is 9673 instead of 8080. (Debian is superior in updating the packages. In order to get from RH 7.2 to RH 7.3, you need to reboot, not so in Debian. The transition from 2.2 to 3.0 has been done w/o reboot!) Furthermore you have to put a VirtualHostMonster in the root-direcotry of your Zope. Like this it should work. The long line above makes the link between the link the user sees and what Zope uses internally. If you fiddle around with it, you can even get different zones on the same server…

The other RewriteRule let's a request on /cgi-bin going through unchanged. This is needed if you have scripts running in /cgi-bin that have nothing to do with Zope. If you want to have other directories that don't run with Zope, you can insert entries just above the long line. The [L] means 'last', so if the apache-server encounters a request for /cgi-bin, it stops rewriting and serves this link.

One of the many advantages of zope is it's capability to offer a direct editing of all the sources of a given web-page. So, as the site grows, you don't have to bother about ftp, scp, xemacs, vi or any other of these things. All you have to do is to point your browser to the page you want to edit, then to add “/manage” to the current url. For this page this would be something like:

http://lcmpc10.epfl.ch/Menu/Menu2/How2/manage

Once you press return, you're asked for a username and a password (which you may get by sending a nice e-mail to Linus Gasser) and then you can directly edit the file. In fact, this documentation itself is written using this method! Once you finished changing the file, don't forget using the button “Save Changes”, then click on the tab “View” on top of the screen, and you see if you did good or bad in editing a source.