Merely 4 hours late, the Zope Weekly News lands with a heaping helping of goodies: Rapid Zope Book evolution, lots of fish in the bowl, Zope skin, PTK proliferation, and Zope.org replication.

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And Now For Something Completely Different:

Documentation

-- by Michel Pelletier

This week (a shorty due to Labor day) Amos and I are polishing up spelling, added image and figure semantics to structured text (and extended the HTML and SGML generators to spit them out, yum!). Normalized all the font and style conventions, and started on chapter 1 screenshots. Yeah! I fleshed out a lot of Chapter 9 (Cataloging) also. As always, you can "see the latest and greatest version",

http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/

Zope Status

-- by Brian Lloyd

Summary

Zope 2.2.1 release, progress on dev.zope.org projects

Recent highlights

ZWN has been spotty lately so to recap, Zope 2.2.1 was released August 25th. Lots and lots of bugs were fixed for 2.2.1, and it seems to have covered the issues that were keeping people from moving to 2.2. There have been two reported problems with custom ZClasses after updating to 2.2.1, but we have not been able to reproduce them and they do not seem to be a general problem.

There has been a fair amount of activity on dev.zope.org, with a number of new proposals for things such as session tracking and a unit testing support framework. Chris McDonough gets the prolific-proposal-writer-of-the-week award :) The new security assertion proposal has been made into an active project, and the first draft of the first deliverable (the Zope developer's guide to product security) is "available for review and feedback",

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DeclarativeSecurity/ZopeSecurityForDevelopers

There are also a number of proposal where discussion seems to have petered out - we'll need to start looking at these over time and decide how to either get champions to refine them and move them forward or put them in some sort of proposal archive.

In other news, FourThought continues to work on the new XMLDocument and will shortly be starting on the XSL Templates project.

This week

This week we will be starting to firm up a todo list for the next Zope feature release and trying to get the declarative security "user manual" finalized - after that we'll begin implementing the new assertion style for the next feature release.

Zope Studio

-- by Martijn Pieters

Zope Studio

Due to other project work, no news this week

Skinnable And Localizable Objects

After two weeks of holidaying in Scotland, I am back at the keys.

Week of 13-08

• Architecture finalised.
• Implemented all core objects and code.
• Made practically all of Zope Skinnable

This Week

• Add some code to make skinned files in Zope Core more backward compatible.
• Clean up last few objects with recalcitrant, inline DTML, and make then Skinnable.
• Split out all strings to make Zope fully translatable.

State of the PTK, 2000/09/04

In the weeks since our last report, the PTK community has been quite busy:

• Shane Hathaway landed the proposed next-generation architecture, refactoring the "toolkit" as a set of "portal tools", each providing services to other objects in the portal. The tools include:

  portal_membership

  tracks personalization and owned content, tying them (much more loosely) to the AUTHENTICATED_USER.

  portal_registration

  implements portal-specific policies for user signup, password generation/mailng, etc.

  portal_workflow

  encapsulates the workflow policies of the portal

  portal_catalog

  indexes portal content

  portal_discussions

  implements portal policies for types of content which are "discussable", and how they are linked to their discussion threads.

  portal_actions

  list context-specific actions for portal objects.

  portal_undo

  provide a portal-friendly interface to Zope's undo machinery.

Each of these tools is represented as an interface in the PTKBase product, with a sample implementation (typically preserving the "old" policies/semantics) in the PTKDemo or DemoPortal products. The single most attractive feature of the design is that portal managers can replace these tools on a per-portal basis.

• Fabio Forno provided invaluable aid in debugging the new tools.
• One noticeable result of the new architecture is the renaming of the toolbox to the "actions list", in order to avoid confusion with the "portal tools."
• Bill Anderson released a new version of the Membership product, upgrading it to "beta" status. This product uses ZPatterns to manage member registration and logins, and is on a trajectory for eventual reintegration with the new PTK Architecture.
• Chris Withers announced Swishdot, a successor to the popular Squishdot weblog product, to be built around the PTK.
• Tres Seaver proposed revamping the implementation of the Dublin Core metadata within the PTK, in order to bring it closer into line with the intent of the spec.
• A long thread on "hooking" various portal actions resulted in a proposal to create an "event channel" object, portal_events, as another tool.

PTK Tracker Vitals, 2000/09/04 (since 2000/07/25)

Here is is the current state of the tracker:

  Type / Status   New     Closed     Current

    Bug Reports     5          3         26

    Feature/Doc
       Requests    0         0           14

Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

ZEO Bakes in Zope.org Oven

ZEO is being cooked with Zope.org. This has unfortunately endengered some downtime, as ZEO bugs step out from hiding. The bonus is that Zope.org should be much more stable when this is done, and ZEO users get the benifit of a ZEO that's been put through it's paces.

The Caching Machine

Zope.org now has its images and files cached by Apache and any downstream cache that cares to do so. This should result in a much faster apparent speed for Zope.org, though we can expect that raw hit-count (as measured by Apache) may decline. Stay tuned for the How-To.

Go Forth and Multiply

Zope.org is going to be getting a new ZEO client on a geographically remote machine. Once this is tested and solid, Zope.org mirroring will expand to several clients in strategic spots throughout the globe. Watch this space for more details.

Distributed Decision Making

As a necessary precursor stage for a more active involvement of the community, messages to [email protected] and issues posted in the "zope.org Tracker",

http://www.zope.org/Tracker

will be sent to the zope web mailing list. Hope to see you there!

-EOT-