At the heart of Zope is an integrated object database. This database mirrors the URL used to access objects, and behaves like a file system. The neat trick, however, is that these are intelligent objects, not dumb files. Information can be shared easily and dynamically across folders and documents and other Zope objects without the need to batch process every file in the system to accomodate a small change, say in a header or footer.

These objects can be "dropped in" at any time and anywhere. Out of the box Zope comes with support for some already common objects such as folders, images, arbitrary files, and documents. These objects, through use of folder properties, acquisition, and DTML (Zope's Document Template Markup Language) already give you enough to make a dynamic smart site using objects similar to what is used with static, "dumb" means of publishing.

But there's more. Out of the box Zope also comes with support for User Folders for managing access at any level of the site (and all Zope objects have configurable security attributes). There are also Session objects which allow the entire site or portions of the site to be modified live without affecting normal use of the site. Only users that have joined the session can see the changes until they're commited to the main database. Lastly, there are MailHost objects for configuring access to SMTP servers for use with the DTML sendmail tag. These objects, along with others available seperately, may be combined together in any fashion to achieve the results you want. Database integration, discussion groups, desktop database publishing mechanisms are all examples of some of the other objects available for use on the Zope platform.

Furthermore, this object database is transactional, meaning that only succesful changes will be commited to the database. It supports multi-level Undo, allowing the state of objects to be rolled back to previous versions.