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

• Lalo Martins has begun writing a Zope tutorial in Brazilian Portuguese. His announcement stated he was halfway through, and that it was already useful.

  http://zope.gf.com.br/ZopeIntro

New Products

• Software Product: "Local Factory Objects", submitted by "lalo"

  This package appears to allow you to create Factory objects (objects which manage the creation of ZClass instances) in places other than a Software Product. This is useful to prevent the Add list from becoming unwieldy by placing the Factories in the relevant portions of the site, rather than making them globally available.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/lalo/LocalFactory/LocalFactory-0.1.tar.gz

• Software Product: "Persistent List and Dictionary", submitted by "AndrewWilcox"

  Like the PersistentMapping object, PersistentList and PersistentDict are classes that look like the basic Python types of the same names, but which are persistent and which alert the ZODB when their contents have changed. PersistentDict differs from PersistentMapping in two respects-- It is not limited to strings as keys, and it does not hide keys that begin with an underscore.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/AndrewWilcox/PersistentListDict

• Software Product: "ZDP Tools 0.1", submitted by "roeder"

  This is a distribution of the very tools that make the Zope Documentation Project work. Follow the second link below to see the ZDP in action for an idea of what is possible with this toolkit.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/roeder http://zdp.zope.org:8080/ZDP

• Software Product: "StructuredText Document", submitted by "tseaver"

  This is a very simple, ZClass based Product which provides a means of displaying structured text documents without creating a second DTML Method to wrap the structured text. This is often very handy.

  Note that ZClasses cannot be used as a Folder's index_html.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/tseaver/STX_Document

Updates

• Software Product: "load_site.py with additional features", submitted by "itmar"

  This is a modification of the load_site utility that comes with Zope. This utility sucks files and directories out of a local filesystem and creates corresponding Zope objects with their contents. Itmar has made some useful changes: the DTML it generates is now in the new Zope 2 syntax; certain HTML metadata and display options may be placed in object properties; javascript can be stripped out of headers (for making Dreamweaver output more lightweight); can clean up output of certain Microsoft products so that quotes display properly on other platforms.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/itmar/load_site

• Software Product: "ZWiki 0.4", submitted by "simon"

  ZWiki is a product which allows the creation of wiki webs in Zope. What is a wiki web? Well, I'm not sure, but Peter Merel says that the typical wiki web is "insecure, indescriminate, user-hostile, slow, and full of difficult, nit-picking people." And these are the GOOD points! Seriously, a Wiki Web appears to be a dynamic web site which is built, torn down and rebuilt by anonymous users.

  1. 4 adds a number of tweaks, tunings, and new default content. See the link for details. "simon"'s news item does not include a link to the Product, so it's included below as a second link.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/simon/ZWiki/ZWiki_0.4_released http://www.zope.org/Members/simon/ZWiki

Zope.org items

• How-To: "Build a WAP site with Zope", submitted by "Duncan"

  This HowTo describes what you would need to do to allow Zope to serve WML pages to cell phones, PDAs, and other wireless devices via WAP. It addresses issues such as setting the content type correctly, caching, serving bitmaps, and making the standard Zope html-include files both WML and HTML-friendly.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/Duncan/wap_howto

• "Zope Docs", submitted by "AlexR"

  This is a pretty handy resource. "AlexR" has compiled all the HowTo documents on Zope.org and made them available as a printer-friendly Adobe PDF file. In addition, this page has links to a pair of printer-friendly lists of all the HowTo documents on Zope.org, one sorted by name, and one by date.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/AlexR/ZopeDocs

• How-To: "add users in python", submitted by "element"

  In addition to describing the process for adding users to a Zope server from a Python Product, this brief How-To also describes adding the actual User Folder (acl_users), adding a local role, and assigning a role to a user.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/element/addingUsersInPython

• How-to: "Generate URLs for Objects", submitted by "jim"

  This is a very thorough How-To on a common, but simple (once you know the trick) problem. Astonishingly, Jim manages to stretch a one-line answer into a two-page document. I don't want to spoil the surprise ending, but it is possible to ask an object for it's canonical URL, and this How-To explains how.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/ObjectURLs

-- Mike Pelletier.