This week's ZWN covers the upcoming Open Source Convention, the forthcoming Zope 2.2, the PTK's further integration with the community and Zope.org's new community features and recent events.

The opinions expressed in Zope Weekly news are solely the author's, and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope Community at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition.

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Open Source Convention

Zope is going to have a strong showing at the Open Source Convention, July 17-20, 2000 This conference should be pretty amazing. Guido von Rossum is giving a State of Python speech, Gregory Bendord is giving a futuristic keynote on the "Comfy Culture", and the Zope community will be there as well:

• Ryan Huges will be talking about worldpilot
• Paul Everitt will be talking about the Zope-Mozilla Initiative
• Christopher Petrilli will be giving a tutorial on Zope for developers based on the materials taught at IPC8
• In the "It's like Zope just not" department, Elaine Ashton is holding a Birds of a Feather to talk about how Zope's success isn't due to the inherent goodness of Python, and that Perlers can do it too

Documentation Status

-- by Amos Latteier

I'd like to share some what Michel Pelletier and I have been doing to improve Zope documentation.

• We conducted a poll to help us determine what was most needed. We found out that Zope docs are of middling quality and folks most want new user help.
• We wrote an online help system for Zope and wrote help content for all management screens. Right now we are updating this content for Zope 2.2. The help system will ship with Zope 2.2 and an alpha is available right now.
• We've started a Zope API documentation process. Right now there is an extensive Zope API documentation wiki on Zope.org. The fruits of this labor will be API docs that will ship with Zope in the online help system. Right now several API docs are complete and are included in the current 2.2 alpha.
• We've overhauled Zope training materials and will make them available publicly in the next week or so.
• We're still working on Zope Guides and References replacements. I think that the training materials will be quite useful for this effort. I hope to have Guide and Reference replacements done by the end of the summer.

Zope Status

-- by Brian Lloyd

Summary

• Lots of collector issues were completed for inclusion in 2.2 beta.
• All of the hard thinking for the remaining todo list for beta 1 is basically done. Now its a race to the finish line :^)

Last week highlights

1. collector issues were fixed last week in preparation for 2.2 beta, mostly issues that pre-date the 2.2 alpha release. Kudos to this week's MVPs who submitted patches and helped to diagnose bugs and test fixes:
   • Toby Dickenson contributed a patch to speed up Zope startup.
   • Itamar Shtull-Trauring and Chris Withers tracked down a problem with image caching that affected certain versions of Netscape browsers.
   • Phillip Eby helped uncover a problem with double aborting of objects registered with the transaction machinery.
   • Itamar also sent a patch for Netscape misfeature that recognizes Windows extended ISO Latin-1 characters as HTML delimiters which would have slipped by HTML quoting.
   • Anthony Baxter and Kevin Dangoor helped track down a problem with importing in the 2.2 alpha release.
   • Shane Hathaway did some much-needed work on the DateTime module.

   Many folks also participated in a discussion of a proposed Observer interface to support event-based designs (like email notification) in Zope. There is now a proposed set of Observer interfaces on the interfaces Wiki on Zope.org (and there was much rejoicing).

Next week

Finish up outstanding issues and get a 2.2.0 beta 1 release out. The outstanding issues to finish before the beta are:

• Changing how ownership is handled for move / rename operations. Ownership info will not change for move or rename operations, and a new knob will likely be added to the "import" screen so you can choose to import objects with their existing ownership information intact. The online help for ownership will be updated accordingly.
• Some basic hooks to support virtual hosting (a la SiteAccess) have been designed and will be added to allow product authors to write virtual hosting support without fragile dependencies on parts of the Zope core.
• Finish changes to the undo machinery that will expose a more appropriate subset of undo-able transactions to the user. The set exposed now was fine at one time, but as the line between "site management" and "site user" continues to blur, a more restricted subset will make undo easier to delegate to a broader range of users.
• Get the minimal Observable default implemention checked in to the Zope core. Note that for 2.2 at least, the only impact of this will be that ZClasses will be able to subclass the default Observable implementation. While we suspect that many builtin Zope objects could benefit from being Observable in the longer run, we want to let the interface and default implementation shake out in application usage before taking that step.
• Some misc. catalog bugs need to be closed.

This week in the PTK Community

-- by Tres Seaver

• There's one new bug, one closed bug, and 16 outstanding bugs in the Portal Toolkit Tracker. There are also 14 current feature requests.
• Front door revamped to give better access to PTK resources.
• As an initial step toward DigitalCreations' goal of opening up Zope development to the community, we have invited the following members of the PTK community to jump through the hoops needed to establish them as CVS and Tracker contributors:
  • Chris Withers
  • Steve Alexander
  • Bill Anderson
  • Chip Vanek
  • Kevin Dangoor
  • Dan Pierson
  • Steve Alexander performed the first community checkin to the PTK CVS repository:

    ...and the crowd goes wild!

    • Steve also fixed the recent breakage introduced by tightening security on ZCatalog
    • Dan Pierson has code ready to check in to integrate the PTK with the new LoginManager; he is awaiting comment by the community

Looking Ahead

• Tres Seaver is drafting a vision document for the next-generation of the PTK:
• Chip Vanek has done some work on a new "skin" for the PTK. Watch for him to post it
• Landing Dan's LoginManager patch.

This week in the Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

• The Zope Web fell off the map over Memorial Day weekend, as all the magic smoke got out of the Network Interface Card in the primary nameserver. The problem was rectified, but the mailing lists suffered indegestion for some time afterwards.
• There was an IRC chat with Jim and Paul about Perl Methods. Can Camels have Zen? Check the summary to find this and other exciting answers.
• There is a Tracker for zope.org! Please submit your bugs and feature requests here. Don't forget to check to see if someone has already submitted your request.
• There is a mailing list for zope.org. Join if you want to be involved in making zope.org ever more elucidating.

Bugs/features addressed

1. open bugs and feature requests lie within the tracker currently: 4 bugs have been resolved and 2 accepted.

• Mountable Filesystem has been added so that Wikis stay unpacked to track their history.
• Loging in and out now takes you back where you came from
• Clicking on Spotlight takes you to the old spotlights
• All zope-related mailing lists are now listed. Thanks to rungaya for submitting this request
• Products can now be sorted according to Author, Date and Title: The request of many, including Evan Gibson, rungaya, and mindlace :) More product sorting features have been requested.

Zope Mail

There was a net gain of 78 subscriptions to all the mailing lists @zope.org in the week ending May 21.

• zope lost 48 subscribers, but still managed to eke out 8 more than we started the week with.
• zope-announce managed to net 13 new subscribers, hopefully encouraging some people to actually post announcements there :)
• zope-dev proved academically challenging, losing a net two subscribers in the last week, bringing the brain drain over the last two weeks to 5.
• zope-ptk netted four subscribers. I expect this newsgroup to be one to follow in the coming months.
• zope-mozilla held more or less even, with one net subscriber.
• zdp picked up a net five members, continuing growth that has been maintained since a mid-December lull.
• zope-packagers stayed even, zope-checkins lost one, and digicool-cvs stayed even, more evidence that Zope needs to help people to use The Source.

Next Week:

• Making the Members page do something is an issue that's been floating around for at least two months. Work will be put in, and progress will be made. Follow the fireworks in the tracker and see Digital Creation's jam session on the broader topic of ReallyBigFolders
• Alexandre's printer-friendly list should find it's way onto the how-to page.

Future Plans:

• Chris Withers jumped on the idea that we could use zope.net and zope.com, and fired up a wiki about it
• Members of the community actively interested in zope.org need to be part of making it, in similar fashion to the way people are getting access to the PTK & zope CVS.