This week's somewhat abbreviated ZWN includes Zope at LinuxTag and the Open Source Convention, lots of documentation progress, including a chat, a new home for Zope Studio and more!

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Coming Events

LinuxTag

There will be a Zope booth at the LinuxTag in Stuttgart, Germany from June 29th to July 2nd. In addition to the booth that will be there for the whole conference, there will be 2 rooms available for talks and discussions on the business day, Thursday 29th.

We are still looking for people who want help organizing the conference, give some talks and attend the booth. Generally, it would also be great to know who is planning to be at the conference. Please send feedback to Stephan Richter See Zope at Linuxtag for the most up-to-date information.

The Open Source Convention

This enormous convention hosted by O'reilly, is shaping up to be pretty interesting. Aside from the State of Python, given by Guido von Rossum, there's also going to be a talk on the CERT Advisory about cross-site scripting, a web-wide security issue that the Zope Community was among the first to begin implementing security policies for: they'll land with zope 2.2.

Zope is going to be at the conference in force, with:

• Paul opening eyes to the Zope-Mozilla initiative
• Ryan telling the world you can have web IMAP and collaboration
• Christopher, as always, concentrating on the edification of the community

Documentation

-- by Amos Lattier

This Week

• Stephan Richter finished reviewing, fixing, and expanding online help content for the Zope management screens. We hope to get him set up with CVS and get this checked in later this week or next week.

  In addition to brining the help content up to date, he is converting it to use Structured-Text. This will make editing help pages much easier and will eliminate the two step process of editing XML, rendering to HTML and then checking the HTML into CVS. This should make life much easier for the Zope team when they are documenting their work.

• Amos released updated Zope training material that he and Michel Pelletier have been working on for the past couple weeks.

  There are twenty slide presentations which cover such topics as DTML, application design, and developing Python products.

  Note: the PowerPoint slides are built by a Python script that reads Structured Text and talks to PowerPoint over COM - cool.

• Michel and Amos participated in an IRC chat about documentation. A transcript of the chat is availiable Thanks to everyone who participated and posed great questions. We even got a volunteer commitment out of the chat - way to go ZDP folks!
• Amos is putting together a wiki that details all official Zope documentation projects, their schedules and status. Look for an announcement before the end of the week. We hope that this along with weekly ZWN summaries will give folks a much better idea of what were doing on the documentation front.
• Michel is working on turning his in progress O'Reilly book on Zope into a piece of official Zope documentation. If all goes well the book will replace the current Guides. We are really excited about this and think that if we are successful that this will do a tremendous amount for Zope documentation.

Next Week

• We plan to complete and make public the Wiki that describes all official Zope documentation projects, their schedules and status.
• We plan to focus on getting docs in shape for Zope 2.2 Specifically this means shoring up the help system docs, API docs, and tutorial. This all won't get done next week, but hopefully we can make some good progress and stay on track to have everything up to date for the 2.2 final release. If we are really fast we may even sneak a DTML reference into the Zope 2.2 final release.
• Hopefully we will have final word on the status of converting Michel's Book into official documentation. That means we can start the process of making the Book public and opening it up to community critique and contributions.

Zope Status

-- by Brian Lloyd

Summary

• More collector issues resolved, made progress on the todo list for the 2.2 beta.

Last week highlights

A somewhat shorter list this week since we have changed the scheduling of the ZWN :) 12 more collector issues were closed and the changes to the ownership model were checked in (move and rename operations no longer affect ownership, a knob was added to the import screen to allow retaining existing ownership on import). The online help for ownership and import were updated and expanded as well. This week's friends of the core:

• Jeff Rush contributed several patches from his RPM distribution.
• Chris Withers gets the bug-writer-o-the-week award :^)
• Sam Rushing clarified the license for the medusa files underlying ZServer.

Next week

Finish the outstanding issues for 2.2 beta 1:

• 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. (I think that this is actually in testing now).
• 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.

In other news, there is now a zope-dev wiki where we will begin capturing discussions on future Zope development.

Zope Studio

-- by Martjin Pieters

• Zope Studio has a new home.
• With the new home comes a new and improved front door, with better access to the resources. This also includes a Tracker!
• I fixed the Zope Studio install issues. This should be in CVS by the time you read this.

Looking ahead

• More fixes to unbreak Zope Studio against the current Mozilla codebase.
• Start implementation of a object handling component architecture, where new object types can be supported with installing new Zope Studio components.

Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

• The Spotlight has been altered in a mostly behind-the-scenes fashion, but they should be easier to maintain.
• The second Zope Chat went over well. I want to do them every week: Tell me what the topics should be If you want to speak, tell me
• The came_from bug was squished
• ZopeNews properly formats structured text