This page tries to answer some of the frequently asked questions about
Zine. If you have a question that is not answered on this page, send
a mail to one of the developers or ask your questions on the IRC Channel
(#pocoo, on irc.freenode.net).
It's hard to sum it up in a few sentences and for all other blog engines out there, but the design of Zine makes it very secure and extensible. It's also very simple to upgrade a Zine installation which makes it interesting if you want to host multiple Zine installations and upgrade them all in one go. Another important fact is the programming language: Python. If you want to extend your blog it's important to know the underlying programming language and Python makes it simple to dive into extension development.
Zine currently outputs valid HTML 4 and not HTML 5 or XHTML. The reason for this is that we want to make it simple for theme developers to design themes. HTML 5 is not yet a stable specification, therefore out of the scope, and XHTML is currently problematic from different points of view.
While some browsers render XHTML as HTML if sent as text/html
and if sent with the XHTML mimetype, some popular browsers such as the
Microsoft Internet Explorer just display the XML file source.
We're constantly watching the development of the upcoming standards (XHTML 2 and HTML 5) to see when we will make the switch to one of those specifications. If you really need XHTML support (because of MathML), there is currently no supported way beside hacky JavaScript solutions.
The reason why Zine is implemented as a Python application is that it makes the core easy to maintain and allows us some programming tricks that are not possible in PHP. It makes it also a lot easier to develop plugins for Zine because of many reasons. If you are interested in more details, have a look at the sourcecode which should speak for itself.
Zine is released under the modified BSD License. You don't have to pay for Zine, and you can modify it as you like. All details can be found in the license.