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.

Suggestions for ZWN items are happily accepted. Please mail them to , put ZWN somewhere in the subject and remember to include URLs.

Announcements

• ActiveState has announced it will be offering industrial-strength commercial Python support. ActiveState is renowned for their Perl support and development tools. The press release, linked below, includes comments from Paul Everitt.

  http://www.activestate.com/press/releases/python.htm

• Frank Wilson, editor-in-chief at O'Reilly, presently has quite a lot of commentary on the IPC8, Python, Zope and Digital Creations in his "Frankly Speaking" column.

  http://www.oreilly.com/frank/

• O'Reilly recently launched their new portal, O'Reilly Network. The prestigious first feature is an interview with Paul Everitt, which explores some of the hidden gotchas and bonuses of opening up your software. The interview is available as text and three flavours of audio: High bandwidth RealAudio, low bandwidth RealAudio, and MP3. Nice!

  http://www.oreillynet.com/ http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/01/25/interview/index.html

• You can now follow ZopeStudio (aka the Zope-Mozilla Initiative) as it evolves by tracking the new ZopeMozilla CVS. For more information, see:

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-announce/2000-January/000102.html

• The Zope Portal Toolkit (PTK) is now a Real Live Product, and is also avalialable to be tracked by CVS. See the post in the [email protected] list.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-February/000111.html

• Chris McDonough reported ZDNet UK's analysis of open source application servers Zope and Midgard.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/Links/zdnetuk-appserver

• Trey Seaver announced the commencement of the Zope Guru of the Week "contest". Trey even made the application handling the ZGotW downloadable.

  http://zope.palladion.com/demos/ZGotW

• "jwashin" submitted a "ZClasses Survey/quiz product". It is still undergoing development, and contributions are welcome.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jwashin/Survey

• Geeknews.org published an interesting interview with Rick Collette, head developer for SPIRO Linux. In it, Rick explains the reasoning behind including Zope as a distribution component.

  http://www.geeknews.org/features/interviews/spirolinuxinterview.html

• Linux Weekly News offered the following link to ZopeNewbies' coverage of the IPC8 and it's Zope Track. Photos!

  http://weblogs.userland.com/zopeNewbies/

New Releases

• Zope 2.1.3 has been released. This update contains fixes for a race condition that could cause Zope to hang on very high-traffic sites, two database packing bugs, and a bug that caused Zope to sometimes hang instead of shutting down when the shutdown function was accessed over a very fast network.

  http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.3/

• "ngps" announced the availability of a very exciting product, "M2Crypto", which allows ZServer (and so Zope) to speak SSL natively.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/ngps/m2crypto_news

• RainDog submitted version 0.0.1 of TTImage. TTImage renders arbitrary text to images on-the-fly.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/RainDog/TTImage

• "haqa" has contributed "Favourite Links", a ZClass-based product which presumably manages a collection of links.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/haqa/ZLinks

Updates and Patches

• "kslee" contributed Zope patch which allows you to select from a list of default contents when creating a DTML Method/Document.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/kslee/DTML_Repository_Patch

• "faassen" released version 0.2 of ZFormulator.

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

• "phd" announced that mod_pcgi2 has reached version 1.0.0.

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

• "jephte" updated jcNTUserFolder to version 0.0.2.

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

• "kslee" spent some time hacking on ZCatalog's splitter.py and the result was Voodoo Kludge Splitter. The splitter is what determines word breaks for full text searches. The Voodoo Kludge Splitter allows full text searches of non-ASCII content, such as Korean, Japanese and Chinese. There are caveats to be aware of.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/kslee/VoodooKludgeSplitter/

• Evan Simpson has brought his SiteAccess product up to version 1.0.0. This is the first stable release. SiteAccess allows you to use virtual hosting to make non-root Zope objects appear to be the root of your website.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/SiteAccess

• "htrd" contributed a Zope hack which "provides support for wide character strings in ZPublisher, property pages, and property sheets."

  http://www.zope.org/Members/htrd/wstring

• "jules" contributed a HowTo which describes the creation of "Smarter" forms. The idea is to prevent the user from ever having to go "Back" by representing forms with prior inputs already filled in.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jules/smarterforms_html/smarterforms_html

• Another HowTo from "jules", this one describes auto-starting Zope on boot on a SuSE 6.3 system.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jules/SuSE-6.3_html

Zope.org items

• Chris Petrilli has made all the slides from the tutorials he offered at the Zope Track of IPC8 available online.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/petrilli/Presentations/

• "kusako" contributed a Tip which explains how to catalog a group of properties as though they were one.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/kusako/AdvancedCataloging

• Miklos Nemeth submitted "How-To: Using Emacs with Zope on RedHat 6.1". It appears to walk the user through using Emacs as a Zope development environment.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/nemeth/usingEmacsWithZope

• "rbickers" wrote an excellent HowTo on Running Zope on BeOS. The HowTo includes links to a suitable Zope binary.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/rbickers/Zope_on_BeOS

• Continuing a thread, Jeffrey Shell wrote a similar HowTo for MacOS X.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jshell/buildingZopeOnMacOSXServer

• "jephte" submitted a HowTo describing how to make Zope work in remote user mode (this is, making the webserver deal with Authentication) in conjunction with IIS.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jephte/HOWTO/IIS_and_Zope_in_REMOTE_USER_mode

• Chris Pertilli has started a Z SQL Method FAQ. He is accepting additional questions and answers.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/petrilli/ZSQLFAQ

• Chris McDonough wrote an EXTENSIVE HowTo describing the process of installing Zope and upgrading an existing Zope installation, complete with screenshots. If you are having difficulty getting Zope off the ground, this looks like the place to start.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/zopeinstall/ZOPE-INSTALL-HOWTO

• Miklos Nemeth also contributed a HowTo about using the SQL Sessions product. SQL Sessions allows you to store arbitrary per-visitor state in an SQL database.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/nemeth/usingSQLSession

• John Udell wrote "How-To: A example", which demonstrates managing per-date data with the tag presenting the interface.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/judell/CalendarTagExample

• "anthony" submitted "How-To: Choosing to store data in SQL vs ZODB". In it, he supplies a number of questions you can ask yourself to determine whether to keep application data in the Zope database or an external one.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/anthony/sql_vs_ZODB

• Miklos Nemeth has written another HowTo targeted at RedHat 6.1 users: "Zope and Apache on RedHat 6.1".

  http://www.zope.org/Members/nemeth/howtos/zopeandapacherh61

• Another Chris McDonough HowTo: "Using the Zope Debug Log to Track Down Hangs". This HowTo includes a log file analyser.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/DEBUG-LOG

• Jim Fulton has made three of his IPC8 presentations available. They are "Introduction to the Zope Object Database", "Acquisition Algebra", and "Zope Architecture".

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/Info/IPC8/ZODB3News http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/Info/IPC8/AqAlgNews http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/Info/IPC8/ZopeArchNews

-- Mike Pelletier.