HTML pages still deliver the same static content, and CGI scripts still do the same processing. The elements of the site do not communicate and when you change one of the elements you need to manually update the others. 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.