The Zope "Weekly" News returns after a long hiatus. Those Zope Weekly News items submitted in the past few weeks are included here. The next issue will arrive on September fifth.

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.

You can always get to the most recent Zope Weekly News with one convenient URL

And Now For Something Completely Different:

Documentation

-- by Michel Pelletier

Week of July 31 - August 4

The O'Reilly Zope Book (title still to be determined) is moving along faster than ever. Last week saw quite a bit of editorial contribution from our new editor at O'Reilly, Laura Lewin. Final outline restructuring is completed, and Chapters one, two and three are moving along toward rough draft completion. This week we'll be posting the new outlines, structure, and chapter content. By next week's ZWN, we hope to have a delivery schedule with O'Reilly and you'll all find out when you can get your hands on a copy of the book.

An interesting little factoid is that Amos and I are authoring the book entirely in Structured Text (STX). Using the new STX NG, the book structured text is transformed into a DOM object which is used to generate HTML (for the online content), DocBook (for O'Reilly) and PDF (for online printing). STX NG, including its DocBook and PDF capabilities, will be released in future versions of Zope once we wring all the bugs out of it, for now, it can be found on the StructuredText-Dev CVS branch.

Week of August 7 - 11

Last week was super busy for the book. Amos and I added over 10,000 words to the book and the Preface, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are all fully rough drafted and are in O'Reilly's hands for some technical review. There will no doubt be quite a bit more polish applied whilewe go back and forth with O'Reilly. As usual, the entire book can be seen online on the Zope site.

We need your technical review too. We understand that it's a bit rough to really get into it without the screenshots but take it a few chunks at a time and let us know what you think. Keep in mind this is rough draft material. Please send any comments you have to us

Week of August 21 - 25

Amos and I have been quite busy on the book, and chapters 1 through 5 are online in rough draft form! Don't let the roughness scare you off, there is alot of material up there.

The Preface and Chapters 1 and 2 have been proofed by O'Reilly and they will be getting 3, 4, and 5 on Sept. 8th. This week, Amos and I will be adding screenshots and illustrations to the first five chapters, as well as the continuous process of rereading and rewriting.

As always, the book can be read online at

http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/, and comments can be sent to [email protected].

Zope Status

-- by Brian Lloyd

Week of July 31 - August 4

Summary

Tying up a 2.2.1 release, progress on dev.zope.org projects

Last week highlights

1. more Collector issues were closed last week in preparation for a 2.2.1 release. Bug-hunting-Zopistas-of-the-week include:
   • Steve Alexander for his patches to DateTime
   • Toby Dickenson who verified a reported parser module problem to be a Python 2.0 bug
   • Aleksander Salwa sent a patch to fix updating of boolean properties on ZClass property sheets
   • BitDancer for various ZCatalog fixes
   • Adam Karpierz fixed a problem with ZPublisher.Client

Thanks also to anyone I missed and to those who helped out in verifying fixes.

The new dev.zope.org site continued rolling along last week, with several new proposals being added. FourThought posted their proposal for an XSLT product to compliment the upcoming release of their XMLDocument work. For the Zope core, Jim Fulton proposed a naming convention to be used going forward for new Zope APIs.

Two proposals became active projects last week. Martijn Pieters' "skinnable objects" project will work to produce an architecture that can support alternate management interfaces so that Zopistas can create localized versions or just experiment without having to hack the Zope core. Evan Simpson's Cache Manager project will introduce a generalized caching framework for Zope objects.

This week

This week we will be making a Zope 2.2.1 release that resolves all of the known issues that have come up in the course of people upgrading to Zope 2.2 final. We'll also start working on architecting the new public CVS to support dev.zope.org.

One other thing I'd like to get done this week is to start on the first of what I hope will be fairly regular series of articles for dev.zope.org that will talk more about our open development process.

Week of August 14 - 18

Summary

Tying up a 2.2.1 release, progress on dev.zope.org projects

Last week highlights

Lots of Collector issues were closed in the last two weeks. We've been having network problems so few details this week :) We're still working on one last issue and then we'll be ready to make 2.2.1 final.

Dieter Maurer and Adam Karpierz walked away with the award for prolific patch-submitters of the week :)

Several proposals on the dev.zope.org site saw a lot of activity as we try to wrap up initial discussion and turn them into projects. The proposal for improved spelling of security assertions will move ahead soon as I'd like to see this implemented in the next Zope feature release. Work is also proceeding on PythonMethods which I also hope will make the next feature release.

This week

This week we will be making a Zope 2.2.1 release and we'll start architecting the new public CVS to support dev.zope.org.

Zope Studio

-- by Martijn Pieters

Due to other project work, no news this week

"Skinnable And Localizable Objects",

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/SkinnableAndLocalizableObjects/

This project will attempt to provide a mechanism for Zope to discover and use different skins and locales for disk based DTML files and provide Zope Products with localized dictionaries of strings.

Last week

• Project set up
• Initial Use Cases set up and fleshed out

This week

• Design architecture
• Implement

Although I requested feedback from the Zope Community on this project, not many people have actually done so! When implemented, it will be much harder to incorporate your ideas, so please read through the project documentation and leave your comments on the Discussion page.

PTK News, PE 2000/08/08

-- by Tres Seaver

• New PTK release, 0.8.1/0.8.2. See the announcement Note especially the changes and the install notes
• Shane Hathaway is working on a cool refactoring of the functionality currently provided by the portal object.
• Bill Anderson is proposing a redesign of membership

Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

Show Stopper Bugs

These have been the weeks of the show-stopper bugs: First, a bug that prevented me from copying or pasting my ZClass objects (fixed in 2.2.1), then a bug in ZEO prohibited me from working in versions (fixed in 0.2.3) kept the ZWN from coming out.

This Week

Zope.org will be opening up a new area for developers that wish to contribute to the next version of Zope.org. This will include a project at dev.zope.org for renewing the products that Zope.org currently uses for it's various content-objects (news items, how-tos, etc) and work on some other products (Notably the Topic object.)

Interested parties may contact me or hang out and wait for the proposal.