[fulafel]

I remember Zope was pretty universally disliked by Python programmers. But it was for a time probably the most enterprisey thing with Python inside, so maybe it got more points in corporate places as something to try as an alternative to Enterprise Java Buzzwords.

Before Django there was a lot of choice and active libraries / frameworks for Python web app development, IME most apps gravitated more towards "ala carte" use of libraries than one size fits all frameworks, a bit like people do in Clojure today.

Zope was more like a ready to use CMS that incidentally enabled you to mod it using Python in a clunky way.

The object database part of Zope (ZODB) was pretty cool though, used separately (inside Zope the framework-enforced object schema made it just clunky). As long as you didn't let it spread too wide over your codebase. But it had transactions, flexibility of (and problems of...) schemaless, and replication, a long time before the "NoSQL" craze.

[fulafel]

Replying to myself: for those interestedin ZODB, there's also a simpler standalone remake called Durus (by well known Pytoneer Neil Schemenauer): https://github.com/nascheme/durus

It might not have the replication / distributed features though.