Not so with Zope. Every Zope object is smart in the sense that is adaptable and can communicate with other objects. Zope objects work together. Objects acquire information and behavior from other objects. The way you wire your objects together determines what services and content are available to them.
Objects then represent themselves appropriately given their context and content.
This is the publishing process. This is very similar to how a web server refers to HTML files. To a normal web server this URL means return the file named Song inside the Barney directory inside the Users directory. To Zope this means publish the object named Song inside the object named Barney inside the object named Users . With Zope every object is dynamic, so for example if the Song object can be sung in different ways, you can just add additional information to the URL requesting a different behavior.