Zope Book has a license, a Product Developer's Guide in the works, some thoughts on useability, ZTopics in the PTK, Zope Studio demonstrated, Zope.org continues to evolve, and more...

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And Now For Something Completely Different:

Documentation

-- by Michel Pelletier

A good compromise has been reached with the O'Reilly folks with regard to the Book license. Before publication of the book, the material will be posted online but will NOT be under an open content license. After the book is completed and has gone to the press, then O'Reilly will release the book under a still to-be-determined open content license. This is good news because that means our material will be available soon!

Michel has finished up the HTML and DocBook upload/redering/TOC scripts for the book using StructuredTextNG, the new StructuredText system that works with DOM. A nice side effect of this is that StructuredText now supports DocBook output. Last week was spent expanding on chapter by chapter outlines and moving old material into its new location in the outline.

Amos spent last week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention where he gave some presentations, demos, and hammered out the agreement with the editors on the license issue. This week we will be polishing up the material for public presentation Real Soon Now.

Chris McDonough has finished about a quarter of the security chapter of the Product Developer's Guide. Material for the PDG will be released piecemeal as it is completed and thus the security chapter should be available for online perusal Real Soon Now (maybe two more weeks -- sorry folks, doing this on weekends). To contribute content to the Product Developer's Guide, check out the Product Developer's Guide to get an understanding of what the aim of the document is, and contact Chris via email

Zope Status

-- by Brian Lloyd

Summary

Notes from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey.

Last week highlights

Most of last week was consumed by OSCON in Monterey. There was a lot of traffic at the Zope booth - many people who knew of Zope and wanted to learn more. There were quite a lot of Perl hackers at the conference, and they were pretty happy to hear that ActiveState (who also had a big presence at OSCON) expects to make an initial alpha of their Perl support for Zope in a matter of weeks.

We also talked usability with some of the Zopistas at the conference. Even though our usability BOF was rescheduled to 10 pm, moved to a different building, printed up as the "Zope Visibility" BOF and scheduled opposite a Free Beer bash, around 20 die-hards managed to find Amos Lattier, Paul Everitt and me to talk about improving the Zope usability story.

Topics included jargon control, consistency and the difficulty of creating new components whether through ZClasses or as Python based products. We obviously have plenty to do on this front - improving usability will be one of our main goals in the weeks and months to come. The folks at the BOF also gave pretty good reviews to the dev.zope.org site and its potential for improving the situation.

In other news, Tom Yager of InfoWorld published a "largely positive review of Zope 2.2 (beta 3)",

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/mt/xml/00/07/17/000717mtzope.xml

Unfortunately he was using some old or inaccurate information and lists ZEO as an expensive add-on product rather than as Open Source. Hopefully this will be remedied (though there are some who have warned me not to count on it...)

This week

This week we will be catching up on 2.2 upgrade issues and moving forward with some of proposals on dev.zope.org. I also hope to write up a more in-depth version of the usability issues we talked about at the BOF and try to identify a bite-sized chunk that would be a good candidate for a Fishbowl project.

Recent PTK Happenings

-- by Tres Seaver

• Shane Hathaway checked in a set of refactorings which make it possible to use the PTK without the ZPatterns or LoginManager products.
• Monty Taylor, Chris Withers, Dan Pierson, and Shane discussed adding "mappable roles" (qua "groups") to the permissions machinery
• Steve Alexander kicked off a fruitful discussion of extensible workflow, and created a wiki to track the results.
• Steve also posted a pointer to using ZTopics with PTK to create a virtual hierarchy

PTK Tracker Vitals, 2000/07/25

Here is is the current state of the tracker:

  Type / Status   New     Closed     Current

    Bug Reports    3         0          22

Zope Studio

Last week:

• Paul Everitt demonstrated a highly hacked up version of Zope Studio at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference last week. With it, he was able to edit DTML code on a Zope Server, save the changes, and show the results. All this from within one application window.
• Due to a bug in XPI, I wasn't able to get Zope Studio to properly install on Mozilla through the web.

This week:

• Flow back some of the work done for the special O'Reilly Open Source convention demo version.
• If the XPI bug is fixed this week, get the XPI install to work.

Statistics:

Two tracker issues related to special work for the O'Reilly conference (which were hidden from view for most people), were closed.

Feature/Doc Requests 0 0 15

Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

This Week

• Changed www.zope.org from ProxyPass to a RewriteRule, enabling the other rewrite rules to do their job.
• Further confirming my destiny to hit every packing error, I spent the pre-dawn hours packing zope.org
• Worked on cataloguing the products to provide a topic view of them. It sort of works: You're welcome to see the work in progress Unfortunately, this work has caused all products to report that they were created on july 21.

Next week

• ZEO transition was delayed for jim's return, but we should be moving on that soon.
• Get Products page working
• Start the Zope Site Project, wherein we redevelop the products that zope uses, within the fishbowl, to play nice with the PTK.