Anyway, as of now, Upcoming Events in Melbourne has been rewritten, and is now running via Zope. See if you can tell the difference.
ooo Zope is so slow and clunky. Well it was last time I used it, about a year ago. Submitting a comment to a forum took about 10 seconds for my server to churn through all the code. Stick with the raw stuff.
In my case, the raw stuff is written in Python as well; and Zope seems to be changing rapidly, so it may be better now.
I intend to add things to the Zopeified dev.null.org gradually, seeing if they work acceptably.
Zope hasn't been slow and clunky for a long time. If you're expecting large numbers of hits, then use ZEO like we do. Otherwise, it's just fine. I also recommend running your site with the CallProfiler product that I wrote (assuming it's all ZODB objects and not on-disk products). Look on zope.org (or in the upcoming Zope 2.6 release) for that.
Oh yeah - consider using Zope's caching for stuff like the upcoming events thing. I'm not completely up to speed with it, but it caches the output of methods. You then just modify your "add event" method so it invalidates the cache. Hey presto, almost static page speed :)
also, you will be slow if you use a product like FSSession for session management.
session management? what's that? :-)
Might i recommend the Portal Toolkit, or whatever the hell they call it these days. I've done my fair share of Zope programming, including a couple boring Zope Products (alas, not BoringProduct) -- if you need help or contributions, lemme gn0w.