Running Zope on Fedora Core 6

My website runs on Zope + Plone / Apache / Fedora core 4. I am in the process of upgrading the OS to FC6 from FC4. As I have mentioned in my article in the Linux / Technology section, FC6 comes with Zope and Plone included. Till FC5 you had to download Zope and Plone and install and configure it. I had incorrectly mentioned in my earlier article that Zope takes the native root user and password for management. It is not so. You have to create a user account even before you start Zope for the first time. Zope starts without any problems if you try to start it before creating an account. However when you open the browser and go to the Zope page (http://localhost:8080) Zope tells you that you have not created any users and you must create one in order to manage the site. To create an account to manage zope run the following commands from the command shell from root login or su.

#cd /var/lib/zope/bin
#./zopectl adduser <username> <password>

Once the user account is created, you can start the zope instance from the same place with the following command.

#./zopectl start

In the previous versions and combinations, I had tried to make the zope as a service and start at the time Linux started. Since I am not a Linux expert, I could not do it at that time easily without writing a script. This time Zope is tightly integrated with the OS and it is included in the Service Manager (System --> Administration --> Server Settings --> Services) as a service. You can either start zope from there. You can also check the box next to zope so that it starts up every time I reboot my box.

Once you create the user and can get to the management screen, you can add a Plone site and you are on your way to create a great website.