G'day,

Zope Weekly News is a digest of some of the useful and interesting events which have occurred on the various Zope mailing lists and the Zope.org site. It is published each Wednesday evening.

Any opinions contained in the Zope Weekly News are those of the chronicler exclusively.

New Products

• "faassen" released ZFormulator 0.1:

  "ZFormulator is a product that can assist with the creation of HTML forms, their validation and processing. The Zope user can construct forms from within the Zope management interface."

  "Neat feature: eats its own dogfood (ZFormulator is built with ZFormulator!)"

  http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/ZFormulator

• "vladap" released MySQL User Folder. It allows you to store user information in a MySQL database.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/vladap/mysqlUserFolder

• "phd" has submitted an early development release of mod_pcgi2(0.0.1). Presumably, this moves the wafer-thin C stub PCGI employs into Apache's process, eliminating the so-called fork tax.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/phd/mod_pcgi2/mod_pcgi2_v0.0.1

Announcements

• Digital Creations has partnered with Fast Engines to add support for their FastServ product. FastServ provides advanced load-balancing (even within a heterogenous server environment) and works with industry standard web servers.

  http://www.digicool.com/News/FastEngines

• Digital Creations has announced that an early 2000 Zope release will include support for two open protocols heavily supported by Microsoft: the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol.

  http://www.digicool.com/News/integrate

• Another press release from DC: Jon Udell will be delivering a keynote at the Zope Track of the 8th International Python Convention.

  http://www.digicool.com/News/Udell

• "TWilson" announced a special interest group on the subject of Zope and educators. The group is still in it's formative period, so get involved now to help plan it's future.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/TWilson/Zope-edu

• Tom Deprez reported on the state of the Zope Documentation Project.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/1999-December/002524.html

• Eduardo Fernandez Corrales has a Spanish Zope portal and mailing list.

  http://zope.sistelnet.es/ http://zope.sistelnet.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hispazope

• Paul Everitt sent out a reminder that it's time to register for the Zope Track at the 8th International Python Conference.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015052.html

Updates

• Zope 2.1.0 final has been released! This release includes many bug fixes, speed improvements and new features.

  http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.0/

  A log of everything that has changed is also available.

  http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.0/CHANGES.txt

Zope.org items

• Zope Resources is changing slightly. Zope Hosting Providers is being replaced with a more general page, Zope Solution Providers.

  http://www.zope.org/Resources

• "Zen" submitted a pair of tips about Zope's little-known manage_debug method, which can provide profiling information and information useful for debugging connection problems.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/Zen/tips/profiling http://www.zope.org/Members/Zen/tips/manage_debug

• "tseaver" reported a LinuxPlanet review of Zope. Kevin Reichard (the reviewer) brings with him a fresh perspective as someone coming from outside the "Zope community". He gives Zope an overall 4/5 rating and raises a number of concerns, some valid, some perhaps less so. Kevin represents a demographic destined to become the majority of Zope users (namely, those who view Zope as a tool rather than as a way of life. ;-) ) and so his review deserves careful consideration.

  http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/1319/1/

Notable Discussions

• Rodrigo posted a query about using Zope with SSL. The common solution is to use Zope with Apache, IIS or Netscape Server to provide a secure connection. David Kankiewicz cited an old post about a product which gives ZServer the ability to establish SSL connections!

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015061.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015063.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015065.html

-- Mike Pelletier.