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 [email protected], put ZWN somewhere in the subject and remember to include URLs.

Announcements

• Zope 2.1.4 has been released. The blame goes to Evan Simpson, who pointed out a problem which would allow people to construct links to a Zope server such that it would cause JScript (or other HTML-embeddable scripts) to be executed in the user's browser. This script would appear to come from the Zope server. While this is not too terribly dangerous (your browser doesn't have any security holes, right?), all users are encouraged to upgrade.

  http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.4/Zope_214_release

New Releases

• "brianh" has been given custodianship of the Ultraseek DA product. This is a Zope Database Adapter which provides an interface to Infoseek's Ultraseek Server search engine.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/brianh/UltraseekDA

• "ngarcia" announced the first public release of the Wampum Generator, a CyberCash Connector for Zope. This product gives application developers the ability to process Internet credit card transactions in Zope.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/ngarcia/WampumGenerator

Updates

• Digital Creations has released an updated version of the Sybase Database Adapter. It's hoped that this release fixes the memory leaks of the prior version.

  http://www.zope.org/Products/DA/SybaseDA/

• "Drew" has updated the ZPhotoAlbum product. This product presents pages of ZPhotos (images) scaled to the user-specified thumbnail size. The present version is 0.4.3.

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

• Jonothan Farr updated his LocalFS product. This product allows Zope to serve files out of (shockingly enough) the local filesystem. Additionally, it can serve from network shares if you are running Zope on a Windows machine.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jfarr/LocalFS

Zope.org items

• Chris McDonough has crafted a gentle and easily digested introduction to Zope he's called, "Gain Zope Enlightenment By Grokking Object Orientation". If you are not a computer scientist, geek or Python programmer, this seems to be the place for you to start. He does a wonderful job of answering a very difficult question, "What is Zope?" At the end, the complete novice should have a decent understanding of how Zope works, what an object is and what it means to publish one, and how these objects work.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/gainenlightenment

• "muesli" created a HowTo which explains the domains security feature of user objects. This allows you to restrict access to specific hosts, domains, or IP addresses.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/muesli/AuthByAddress

• "jec" posted a HowTo which explains automating the starting and stopping (at startup and shutdown) of a Zope server on a Red Hat system.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jec/startstop_howto_html

• "vernier" has written a HowTo on creating custom Zope Debian packages.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/vernier/debian

• "lalo" wrote a HowTo which describes how to use cron to trigger events on a Zope server.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/lalo/cron

• Jens Vagelpohl has distilled the essence of his experience creating the Zope Demo CD which was distributed at IPC8 and created a HowTo so you can create one, too. These CDs work on both Windows and Linux systems. On a Windows system, the Zope server can start right off the CD, and a web browser can automatically be launched to view the server's content. All this without writing a single byte to the user's hard drive.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jens/docs/zope_on_cdrom

• Chris Petrilli posted a proposal titled "A Confidence Mechanism in User Role Management". The idea is to make Zope Authentication more flexible than all-or-nothing. There is a discussion about this proposal in the Zope-PTK mailing list.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/petrilli/ConfidenceMetric http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-February/000169.html

Corrections

• Last week, the editor-in-chief of O'Reilly was mistakenly called "Frank Wilson". His name is in fact Frank Willison.

-- Mike Pelletier.