Dedicated Environments and Re-Inventing the Wheel
I remember having a discussion long ago about the fact that Zope requires a dedicated server to run. There are not so many CMS applications written in Python. From what I know Zope/Plone is the only option. On the other hand, PHP has more than it’s actually possible to count. Almost none of them require a dedicated server or any complex setup. It feels like they were all built to run on shared hosts. I think all of those projects are missing something very important by trying to reach the most common denominator.
PHP (especially with PECL) has an impressive amount of extensions that can be installed and offer stable and mature libraries that have been writtin in C. The amount of time wasted in re-writing those libraries, or emulate part of the functionality, in PHP to be able to run them without any dependency is incredible.
If you’re developping an intranet and actually have access to the server configuration (even if it implies bugging the admin for hours), I strongly recommand to take a look at the list of non-default PHP extensions and PECL. They are faster and usually have better documentation than PEAR libraries.