A CMS as a front end to build an applications GUI

We need a Web-based front end for our C++ application. It's relatively simply (15 screens, simple requirements, database-centric) and should be customizable. We would like to have a workflow component... that's more complicated. Originally I thought the quickest way would be a simple PHP/Apache application, but then somebody suggested the Plone/Zope platform.

One big advantage of this approach ("this" being a CMS with underlying framework) would be expandability (it's easy to create new web pages), excellent rights开发者_高级运维 management, workflow and the Zope applications server platform, which may or may not be useful to us in the future. Negative is that you're basically using a CMS for something it wasn't intended to do: be a Applications GUI. It's unclear to me how much work this would be and if we can even effectively use the workflow for our workflow.

Perhaps a "basic" framework (ex. django, cakePHP) would be more appropriate? ...but then all web pages need to be created from scratch.

I hope this isn't to general a question - but any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated. BTW: How relavent is the Plone/Zope and Python language these days?

You should stick to the language your team knows best. If it's C++, you'll be suprised to know that there are C++ Web frameworks available, such as Wt. A full blown CMS like Plone is overkill for such a simple use case (basically a web frontend to the database).

You should have a look at Django-CMS. It's incredibly easy to hook application logic to any page. I use it as the base for all of my web apps.

Django was originally extracted out of a CMS, making it particularly useful for building CMS and CMS-like applications.

You should check out many open source applications that implement CMS and CMS-like features.