Zope used to be utterly useless for content management. It didn't provide any of the things that I think when I hear content management: workflow, versioning, good templating, scheduled publication, etc. They've been working on some new stuff in that area, which may improve the situation.

As for Perl support, I'd stay away. If the core is written in Python, there must be some glue to get Perl code to work and that will slow it down, plus it will still need to run Python which will give memory overhead from both interpreters, and it's probably not as stable as the Python interface... It just sounds like a bad idea.