Z Classes herald a new era in Zope development. Z Classes allow you to build your own types of objects through the web. In effect, instead of being limited to existing objects like Folders and DTML Documents, when building your site, you can now define your own classes of objects. For example, if your site includes things like employee manuals, bug reports, shopping malls, etc., then you can actually create Employee Manual objects, and Bug Report objects, and all the rest. In short, Z Classes let you create and store "your kinds of things" instead of Zope things.
You define your classes in the Control Panel, and then you can create and manipulate your objects just as you create and manipulate Folders, DTML Documents, and all the other standard Zope objects. As you change and update your classes, all the existing instances of those classes are updated. So if you add a new method to your Employee Manual class, all your Employee Manual objects will be updated.
You can even export your Z Classes and use them in different Zope installation, thus allowing you to leverage your work across Zope installations.
Basically Zope classes make extending Zope much easier. In fact there is no Python programming required. This is a big change from the days of using the Product API and Python to extend Zope. Now building new classes is easy enough that you can justify making several specialized classes to solve specific problems.
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