LinuxTag is nigh, the Open Source Conference, Launch of Zope 2.2.0b3, Online help, API Documentation, Tutorial fixes, Zope Book, Zope DA for Perl DBI, install script for Zope Studio, and more!

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And Now For Something Completely Different:

Coming Events

One Day to 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 Lattetier

Amos and Mike have been working hard to gets docs in shape for the Zope 2.2 final release. They are focusing on online help docs and API docs. After the Zope 2.2 final release focus will switch to the book which will replace the current guides. Stephan is at Linux Tag. Mike will be conducting training later this week.

Online Help

• The massive task of proofing and checking help content for all Zope management pages continues. This task should be done by the end of this week. From here on out maintaining these pages should be less of a burden. All help content is in structured text in CVS. So it's easy to generate patches.
• New help content is being generated to cover 2.2 features such as History and Ownership. By 2.2 final all new features should include online help.

Tutorial

• The release of Zope 2.2b3 fixes a problem that kept the tutorial from working in beta 2. Now you should finally be able to run the Zope tutorial.
• We're planning on installing the Zope tutorial on Zope.org so members will be able to go through the Zope tutorial.

API Docs

• More API docs are being generated. Right now in CVS we have API docs for these Zope classes:

  AuthenticatedUser, DTMLDocument, DTMLMethod, DateTime, ExternalMethod, File, Folder, Image, MailHost, ObjectManager, ObjectManagerItem, PropertyManager, PropertySheets, PropertySheet, Request, Response, Vocabulary, ZCatalog, ZSQLMethod

  • API docs now include constructor information for Zope Products. This information tells you how to create an instance of an object in an ObjectManager.

Book

• Amos and Mike wrote a new table of contents for their Zope book. Look for this an more information on the book effort soon after the 2.2 final release.
• O'Reilly is still working on determining an open content license.
• Current thoughts are to author the book in structured text and make it available via CVS. This would keep things as simple as possible for collaborative purposes. It remains to be seen if structured text is rich enough for book work and if it can be transformed into a format the O'Reilly accepts. STXNG (Structured Text, Next Generation) should help since it provides a DOM abstraction for structured text documents.

Zope Status

-- by Brian Lloyd

Summary

We got both beta 2 and beta 3 of Zope 2.2 out last week, and there was much rejoicing!

Last week highlights (and lowlights)

1. collector issues were closed last week, including the main beta issues (problems unpickling SQLMethods, incorrect handling of broken products, problems adding the tutorial). Thanks to Rob Bickers, T. J. Mannos, Oleg Broytmann and many others who worked out beta 2 and whose feedback helped track down the problem with SQLMethods.

Related to the 2.2 beta releases, there is now a guide for Zope product authors that explains the security changes in 2.2 and how to ensure that "your products are 2.2 compatible",

http://www.zope.org/Documentation/How-To/ProductAuthorUpdateGuide/index_html

In other news, Gisle at ActiveState posted a message to the zope-perl list to say that he already has a "Zope database adapter for Perl DBI working",

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-perl/2000-Jun/000032.html

Next week

Next week we're planning to finish any remaining beta issues and get 2.2 final released. We will also be working on the new "DevHome" area of Zope.org which will be a home base for developers working on the Zope core and other projects such as the PTK. The post-2.2 Zope roadmap and other background materials at least should be available by the next ZWN.

This week in the PTK Community

The brave, brave, Sir Seaver has swiftly turned his tail and fled from Texas, on a quest to find the Holy Grail. Barring any foul, cruel, bad-tempered rabbits, he should be at the Castle of Digital Creations in time for the next edition of the ZWN.

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

The zope web needs to change according to the needs of it's users. It needs to do so in a organized fashion. In order to make this happen, please submit bug or feature requests to the Zope.org Tracker . When you do so, please check to see if the bug or feature request already exists, and if so, add yours to it.

This week

• The Products page recieved more work, on the suggestion of Michael Bernstein. This promped several people to suggest even more things that should be done with the products page.

  The presentation of Products and How-To's are going to change a lot, which leads to the next topic:

• There's a different zope-web wiki because we need to keep track of the history of wiki's. Thanks to Chris Withers for getting the ball rolling on a wiki for the zope web.
• The development of the zope-web is tracked on the wiki. Stop by there, and see if you like where it's going!
• There's a job board created by Paul Lewis! Thanks, Paul.
• Commenting on a member's page now includes the page's URL in the email, as requested by tommy_b and Amos Latteier.

Zope mail statistics:

• Zope: +24 subscribers
• Zope-announce: +17 subscribers
• Zope-dev: +3 subscribers
• Zope-ptk: +9 subscribers
• Zope-mozilla: +2 subscribers
• ZDP: +2 subscribers

Next week:

• Zope.org transitions to 2.2