Script Zope with Word, Eby releases a new ZPatterns, Bernstein mans the gates, Brian spawns a new process, upcoming Portal release, McDonough the Proposal Machine, and Shane Hathaway: Ghostbuster

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And Now For Something Completely Different:

Documentation

by Michel Pelletier

Gobs of new content has been uploaded to the book.

• Find out how to script Zope from a Microsoft Word macro!
• Bask in the light shed on the <dtml-sqlgroup> tag!
• Query your Catalogs in exciting, undiscovered ways!
• Gaze upon strange new symbols in the Perl Method documentation!

All this and much, much more can be yours by just reading. You can also greatly enhance your weekly karma allotment by sending us feedback.

Zope Status

Hi, I just forked off a kid: Bryan & Tracy Lloyd are now the proud parents of Cameron Lloyd! Congratulations!

State of the PTK, 2000/09/21

In the weeks since our last report, the PTK community has been rather quiet:

• The issue of integrating the PTK membership system with external authentication sources (especially NT/SMB authentication) is near and dear to many folks' hearts.
  • Bill Anderson announced a security fix release to the Membership product; Membership is an "ease-of-use" layer on top of the LoginManager/ZPatterns products, and has not yet been re-integrated with the PTK.
  • Michael Bernstein has worked out the details of using LoginManger

    and Membership to create a portal authenticated against SMB including getting local roles to work

  • Phillip Eby released version 0.4.2a3 of ZPatterns
  • Shane Hathaway added support for a portal_preferences tool which will allow the portal to store data about a member separately from the user object provided by the authentication machinery.
• Chris McDonough has created a proposal for "Application Objects" in Zope; he is asking the PTK community for feedback.
• Tres Seaver added back the constructor form for PortalFolders.
• Shane Hathaway fixed a two bugs reported by Andy Dawkins:
  • one in which Discussion replies were created private - another in which unchanged passwords were mysteriously set to None
• Several "open questions" were raised on the list:
  • Joachim Schmitz asked is there anybody working on a multilingual PTK?
  • Jerry Spicklemire prompted, How does an Owner delegate, or assign an Alternate? for workflow purposes.

Our goal for the coming week is to release version 0.9 of the PTK.

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

Here is is the current state of the tracker:

  Type / Status   New     Closed     Current

    Bug Reports     2         1          27

    Feature/Doc
       Requests     0         0          14

Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

Exorcising Zope.org

The extremely large Members folder (11139 of you!) and acl_users folder was causing Zope.org to load nearly 50 MB of "Ghosts" - stateless objects - into memory.

The ever resourceful Shane Hathaway jumped in with his BTreeFolders for both the acl_users folder and the Members folder.

Now, instead of 26,000 objects loaded at once, only about 1,000 or so get loaded.

Community contribution

Tomorrow, the Zope-web wiki will have the "Organizing Documentation" project proposal, so that those who have volunteered to assist and the community at large will be able to decide what's the best way to get to the documentation on Zope.org.

-EOT-