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.

Announcements

• A security hole has been found and patched. The problem, found thanks to Kevin Littlejohn's efforts, affects those sites which make their Zope management interface available to untrusted users. All Zope users are encouraged to read the announcement and update their Zope installation. Patches are available for both 2.x and 1.x.

  This patch forced two new Zope releases, 2.1.2 and 1.10.4.

  http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.2/Zope_212_release

New Products

• Jephte CLAIN has released a new NT Domain authenticator: jcNTUserFolder. Jephte's Product differs from "htrd"'s in that roles are given through the web and impersonation is not used.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jephte/jcNTUserFolder

Updates

• "Drew" updated the Photo Product. Photo resizes images to the user's preferred size. The present version is 0.1.0.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/Drew/Photo

• "vladap" updated the mysqlUserFolder Product. This update fixes a folder creation bug. mysqlUserFolder allows you to authenticate users with data stored in a mysql database. It also allows you to store arbitrary per-user data, and it supports HTTP and cookie-based authentication schemes. The present version is 0.3.2.

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

• Jephte CLAIN has also released two patches, one to the MIME tag, and one to the import/export system.

  The MIME patch adds *_expr versions of the type, disposition, encode and name attributes of the MIME tag. These allow you to evaluate an expression for the value of the attribute rather than specifying a literal value. The patch also adds the attributes filename and filename_expr to the tag. These attributes supply hints that the client will use to determine the file's name.

  The import/export patch allows you to import objects through the web instead of having to place files on the filesystem.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jephte/MIMETag http://www.zope.org/Members/jephte/WebImport

• "phd" released an update to the mod_pcgi2 package. This update adds a PCGI_ROOT command for virtual hosting. mod_pcgi2 is an Apache module which moves the PCGI client into Apache's address space, preventing the need to start a new process to avoid the "fork tax". The present version is 0.2.0.

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

Zope.org items

• "Gregor" had some quibbles with a couple aspects of Zope's user interface. He wrote and submitted a How-To describing how to prevent the "Powered by Zope" link from opening in a frame, and how to make the Zope document editing TEXTAREA soft-wrap.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/Gregor/misc_nitpicks

Notable Discussions

• Olivier Deckmyn has just started what stands to be an interesting thread for those wishing to take the first step developing Zope applications. Olivier has a set of classes which implement the logic of the application he wishes to produce. He is looking for advice on how to move from a set of standalone objects to a Zope application.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/016251.html

• To ring in the new year, Wei Tao started a Zope wishlist thread. Got a wish, rant or suggestion? Chime in.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2000-January/016318.html

• A thread significant to Product developers: Martijn Faassen desires to develop a set of Product standards. He points out that there are some rather arcane things that one has to do to produce a well-behaved Zope Product, but that many people do not know what they are and even those who do know do not always know why ("voodoo programming"). Martijn makes a number of suggestions to rectify this problem. Chris McDonough graciously offers to contribute some effort to the cause.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2000-January/002823.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2000-January/002824.html

-- Mike Pelletier.