Zope 2 internals

This documentation will attempt to explain some of Zope's internals. It may be useful for debugging purposes, or simply to better understand how Zope works.

The guide pertains to Zope 2.13.

If you only want to know how to use the APIs and features described below, you are probably better served reading the Zope Developer's Guide.

• Startup and product initialisation
  • What happens on Zope startup?
  • How are products installed?
  • How do Zope 2 product constructors work?
• Requests and traversal
  • What happens when a request is received?
  • How does publication traversal work?
  • How does path traversal work?
• Security
  • Declaring object roles and attribute permissions
  • Determining which roles have a given permission
  • Checking a permission in a context
  • Validating access to an object
  • Changing permissions
  • Global and local roles
  • Emergency users
• The ExtensionClass
  • What is an ExtensionClass?
  • How does acquisition work?
• Zope's many hooks
  • Process lifecycle
  • ZODB connection lifecycle
  • Request lifecycle
  • Publication
  • Traversal