June 23rd Zope Weekly News

Upcoming conferences, the launch of Zope 2.2.0b2, indormation on the Zope Book, PTK gets many community contributions, install Zope Studio easily, great plans are made for the Zope Web, and more!

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

The Zope Weekly News now has a permanent home.

And Now For Something Completely Different:

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. There will not be an additional charge for the two rooms on buisness day.

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 * Stephan's revised help content landed in CVS this week. Now Amos and Michel are proofing it.

Michel wrote several more API docs. They are in CVS, look for them in the next Zope 2.2 beta.
Amos posted a guide for Zope hackers explaining how help pages are linked to Zope management screens
Michel and Amos spoke with O'Reilly about using the Zope book as the basis for the new Guides. O'Reilly agrees in principle, though there are some details to work out such as which open content license to use. Amos and Mike also revised the book's table of contents. More information on this project should show up in the Docs Wiki soon.

Zope Status

-- by Brian Lloyd

Summary

Lots of feedback from the beta 1 release and a nasty security issue found and resolved.

Last week highlights (and lowlights)

collector issues were closed last week, and there are only a few things left to do for 2.2 beta 2. Fixes for crashes caused by the new tutorial, multiple selection property behavior, problems using _.namespace and some Win32 installation nits were among the fixes. The most visible, of course, was the fix for the security issue in DocumentTemplate. After an ill-advised attempt to make a 2.1.7 release, we stepped back and took a cleaner approach of making a "hotfix" product

that can be installed by any 2.0+ Zope installation without requiring folks to upgrade if they don't want to. This approach will probably be used in the future for things like security issues where quick action is required but wholesale upgrading would be painful. This week's friends o' the core are all the folks who have been putting the beta through its paces (too many of you to list here!).

Next week

Next week we'll be getting beta 2 out and working out remaining issues for 2.2 final. We will also get going on the "opening the development process" initiative, which was rudely interrupted last week by the security issue. I still hope to get a basic "Zope core development"- focused area set up, publish the draft Zope roadmap for comment and start working out some post-2.2 plans.

This week in the PTK Community

-- by Tres Seaver

Shane Hathaway checked in the first set of changes toward the RefactoringPTK proposal we floated last week.
Unfortunately, the DemoPortal.zexp export file wasn't updated, so it can't be imported at the moment. This will be fixed Real Soon Now (TM). This problem is noted in the tracker:
- http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/Tracker/98
- http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/Tracker/99
- Alexander Schoenfield released a first look at a wxPython-based class browser for Python/Zope.
- Kevin Dangoor released version 0.6.0 of his Membership package which eases the installation of a LoginManager-based user folder. He is looking for feedback on the exact layout of the Member object, working to gel its API, and therefor ease forward compatibility problems.
- Phillip Eby released version 0.4.0 alpha1 of ZPatterns, which includes the long-awaited DataSkins feature, along with GenericTriggers and other fun stuff. Ty Sarna will release a new version of LoginManager compatible with ZPatterns 0.4.0 shortly.

Looking Ahead

Fix the DemoPortal import problem ASAP.
Re-integrate Kevin Dangoor's Membership product.
Discuss integrating ZPatterns more closely into PortalContent.

PTK Tracker Vitals, 2000/06/22

Here is is the current state of the tracker:

  Type / Status   New     Closed     Current

    Bug Reports    2         0          21

    Feature/Doc
       Requests    0         0          15

Zope Studio

-- by Martijn Pieters

Last week

While still recovering from the temporal forces and avoiding the Spanish Inquisition, I am now back at the Zope Studio helm.

Checked in a new install script that should make installing Zope Studio into Mozilla a breeze.
Mozilla's basic authentication code was broken, and Anthony Baxter found out why. Fixes are available, but not yet checked in to the Mozilla tree. This means that Mozilla at the moment cannot be used to authenticate against Zope sites!

Next Week

Some serious documenting and planning will need to be done, to make clear what Zope Studio will be, how it will work, and when we think we can have some workable results.
Hammer out the metatype component architecture.

Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

This week

I spent much of this week flying to Digital Creations' Fredericksburg office, getting my computer set up there, and trying to get a place.

Nonetheless, some progress on the zope-web has been made: We're starting to get a handle on what the new Zope-web will offer, and how it will provide it's services. Next week, there'll be some specifics on-line.

Next week:

Design document for the zope-web up, and then I'll be in transit with Stuff to F'burg for permanent relocation.