The Open Source Conference, help system almost complete, Tutorial fixes, a new Development area on Zope.org, basic authorization working in Zope Studio, a roadmap for Zope.org, and more!

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The next week of zope weekly news will not be happening, in order to allow the ZWN to get back on a Tuesday schedule.

And Now For Something Completely Different:

Coming Events

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 Michel Pelletier

The 2.2 Help system is just about complete and Amos and Michel are wrapping up the final details for the 2.2 final release. The Online Help system has improved, more complete API docs have been added, and the Tutorial has been polished up and bugs fixed.

Training

The Zope Training material is complete and very comprehensive. Michel conducted a moments notice training last week and Amos will be conducting one more training in July.

Online Help

The massive task of proofing and checking help content for all Zope management pages is done! Every managment screen in Zope has a help button that links to a context sensitive help screen describing how to use that screen.

New content content for the History and Ownership managment screens has been added, making these cool new 2.2 features easier to use.

Tutorial

The Zope tutorial is complete and the recent bugs that prevented it from working with beta 2 have been fixed.

API Docs

The API Docs project is complete! We have hit our milestone goal of having all stock addable Zope objects documented in the API documentation section of the online help system. In addition to the stock objects, we have also documented a number of common Zope objects that are used frequently by DTML programmers. For the 2.2 final release we have 20 API documented:

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

Book

The book table of contents is now online in the docs Wiki.

The current table of contents is a good compromise of beginner and advanced oriented material. While the consideration of future guides is outside the scope of this project, it should be noted that introductory material is favored in the book more than developer material and that in the future we may address this issue with some form of Developer's Guide. We feel however that teaching the beginner masses how to use Zope is much more important than teaching a much smaller audience how to develop with it.

O'Reilly is still working on determining an open content license which we are trying to resolve ASAP so that we can release our rough drafts to the community.

The book will be authored in Structured Text and the new features of Structured Text Next Generation (STXNG) will be used to convert the book to DocBook.

Zope Status

-- by Brian Lloyd

Summary

A short week this week due to the US holiday, but a surprising amount still managed to get done. Many beta bugs were stamped out, and some progress (though admittedly not very visible progress) was made on preparations for the Zope developer site.

Last week highlights

1. collector issues were knocked out last week. Kudos to Dr. Peer Griebel, Adam Karpierz, Toby Dickenson, BitDancer and others who posted patches. In other news, Jim Fulton noticed a problem with the ZODB packing algorithm that could cause problems if you pack to a particular time and then try to subsequently pack to an earlier time. Coincidentally, Ethan noticed it the next day when it bit him on Zope.org :^} Jim has checked in a fix for 2.2.

Last week I also incorporated some feedback on the guide to Zope "security changes for product authors",

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

Amos and the Portland crew revised the online help content and API documentation as well as well as taking care of a javascript problem in the new tutorial.

Next week

The original plan was to get 2.2 final out this week, but I have tweaked the plan a little. In working through the reported beta issues last week there were a few that I thought people would have run into already by now, which makes me think that we should try for a little wider coverage with one more beta release. Look for a beta 4 release Thursday or Friday.

Related to that, one of the problems I think we're seeing is that some folks can't use the beta because certain products they use are not 2.2 ready yet. The product authors (understandably) are not necessarily working feverishly to be 2.2 ready because 2.2 is still in beta :^) To break this impasse, we'll probably give beta 4 a week or so to scare up any last-minute issues and then proceed with a 2.2 final. I'm quite sure that we'll find more issues as people migrate sites and products to 2.2. I think it would be better to finalize 2.2 and resolve issues that pop up in a 2.2.1 relatively soon after than to have the 2.2 beta period drag on any longer.

Finally, as alluded to above, there has been some progress in working out some needed infrastructure for the "developer home" area on Zope.org. I want to get the basic area stubbed out and the description of what the open development process will look like posted this week so that we will have visible progress :^)

Zope Studio

-- by Martijn Pieters

Last week

• Basic Authentication in Mozilla is fixed again, and the latest snapshots allow you to log into a Zope server once more.
• A new step has been added to the ZopeStudioInstallation instructions, to make sure that Mozilla correctly registers the Zope Studio skin. The snapshot (which doesn't need updating) will still have bugs, due to changes in the Mozilla core. Thanks to zig for the issue report.
• A visit to LinuxTag and the 4th of July cut my week short, but some updates were made to the ZWiki pages.

This week

• More work on the ZWiki pages, more documentation.
• Set up a plan for requirements gathering.
• Maybe some fixes to the current Zope Studio code, but only if people supply me with patches. =)

Zope Studio Tracker stats

• 1 new issue, fixed the same day. Thanks zig.

Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

Bug Fixes

• A member that did not exist had to be deleted because the fact that he had no roles messed things up.
• You can now send feedback to Paul Everett because the acl_users folder in his Member folder has been deleted :)
• Ethan is now located in Fredericksburg, VA instead of Fort Collins, CO.

Roadmap

There's been some extensive cogitation on the roadmap for the zope web:

1. Platform issues: These will come first, because everything else depends upon them. This includes:
   • Updating to Zope 2.2 final upon its release. This has the stellar merit of making wikis searchable.
   • Transitioning to ZEO. This is also luminous in that it means we can do lots of diagnostics, updating, and other tasks without taking down zope.org. It will also make scalability easy, though our current PIII-500 is handling the load fine.
   • Fixing Catalog issues. Right now searches for things like dtml-in fail. This needs to change.
   • Topics. The addition of topics that allow filtering either by meta-data or body content will allow the presentation of how-to's, Products, and other types of content to be presented in an easy to follow manner.
2. The User Focus. Zope.org will add three new subdomains:
   • dev.zope.org will be for zope core hackers and python product makers
   • do.zope.org will be for site builders, including content managers and DTML coders
   • biz.zope.org will be for the commerce side of zope
3. Moving to the PTK. This stage will follow close on the heel of the User Focusing, where we integrate the PTK (back) into zope.org in order to gain benefits like discussability, wizards, skins & enhanced workflow.
4. Feature Fest. At this point, Zope.org should be on solid ground, and we can start bringing in more features, like email/list integration, product dependancy checking, and more.

Statistics

• June was a good month for Zope.org, with a record 2.9 million hits, but slightly fewer visits than last month ( 175k instead of 178k ) indicating a ever-more devoted but not necessarily expanding pool.
• The Zope lists had lots of churn, with only 4 net new subscribers.
• It takes 208.725 gallons or 790.1076 litres of 86-87 octane gasoline to travel the 1733.9 miles from Fort Collins, CO to Fredericksburg, VA in a moving truck.