New PTK Release, Zope Book gets feedback, How to control access on a protocol basis, WriteLocking proposal, XHTMLTemplate and HiperDOM, Membership, and docs get organized on Zope.org.

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And Now For Something Completely Different:

Documentation

by Michel Pelletier

The response to book's alpha release was spectacular, with people sending us many great comments. We're listening! The book is improving every day, and very, very soon we plan on handing over the complete technical draft to O'Reilly!

As allways, keep reading and keep sending us comments and we'll keep listening.

Many people have send us mail asking for PDF versions of the book, this is planned, but at the moment the code isn't in place yet to output PDF from structured text, so it will be a while. We hope you can be patient with us because we're really busy making this a good book and we don't have all the time to make the HTML look much better than it does or to produce PDF documentation.

Also, lots of people have sent us mail about the screenshots on the book, yes, we know they look pretty bad in Netscape (fine in Mozilla, though) but all of the existing screenshots are going to be thrown away soon anyway and a whole new set of them will be done for the book, so once again, we ask for your patience and suggest maybe trying out Mozilla (which we will hopefully be using for the new screenshots!) if it really bugs you.

Zope Status

by Brian Lloyd

Summary

A busy week in the Fishbowl

Recent News

Last week was a busy one. Evan scoped out a hole in subscript-notation support in ObjectManagers that required a Hotfix release :( Jeffrey Shell refined his WriteLocking proposal (to support DAV-aware Web tools that require DAV locking support). Shane Hathaway is putting on the sleuth hat to track down some reports of oddities with ZClasses when upgrading sites to 2.2+.

Debate continues to simmer on the zope-dev list on the right way to control access to objects from various protocols - it is a hard problem and there are several viewpoints on this. This is something that we should ponder for the notional Zope 3.

Also on dev.zope.org Monty Taylor is working on a proposal for implementing stored procedure support for the Oracle DA. Hopefully this will eventually lead to a more general interface that other DAs could implement.

On a somewhat belated note, Michel has released alpha one of the upcoming Zope book:

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

Now is the time to get him your feedback. Documentation has been an albatross for Zope for a long time and this book is a huge opportunity to rectify that - please do your part in making it the best it can be by taking an early look and contributing your thoughts or concerns!

Near Future

We are still planning to supercede the XHTMLTemplate project on dev.zope.org with the HiperDOM project - Martijn will be working to get the project updated and herd interested parties to the new development home.

There are a number of outstanding issues that we want to address soon with a 2.2.3 release - we are still in the process of investigating and reproducing some of the issues, but I would expect that this will happen in the next few weeks.

State of the PTK, 2000/10/17

• Michael Bernstein ([email protected]) has made significant progress in his quest to re-integrate the Membership product with the PTK, especially in the area of listing members:
  • http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-September/001753.html
  • http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-September/001758.html
• Bill Anderson announced that he was very selfishly taking time off from responding to list traffic, including messages about his Membership product, in order to get married! :) Congratulations and best wishes from the PTK community abound!
• Tres Seaver released version 0.9.0 of the PTK. "...and there was much rejoicing".
• Tres then had to pull one of the tarballs of the release because the "distribution tab" products for Wizard and DemoPortal depend on a stock ZClass (Products.OFSP._ZClass_for_DTMLMethod) which is not created at import time, but at product initialization time.

  Tres has submitted a patch for this problem to the Zope Collector, but in the meanwhile, the distribution tab versions are not useful.

• Bjorn Stabell posted an "insightful summary": http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-October/001801.html of the issues involved in distributing part of the PTK as "through-the-web" software (i.e., DemoPortal).
• Phillip Eby ([email protected]) announced new ZPatterns documentation including explanations of triggers and rules and a completed SkinScript reference.

PTK Tracker Vitals, 2000/10/17 (since 2000/09/25)

Here is is the current state of the tracker:

  Type / Status   New     Closed     Current

    Bug Reports     4        20          11

    Feature/Doc
       Requests     0         5           9

Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

Find The Docs

The ZDP folks are really taking off. They've categorized all the how-tos and tips, and we're getting set to roll out with a new Documentation guide. Itamar Shull-Turing has already written a Guide to Documentation for Developers which will be used in the creation of the documentation guide.

-EOT-