Structured Documents, Wikis for Now, Documentation process, more Write Locking, HiperDOM, Quick Management fixes, Zope: The Definitive Guide, count the Zopatistas, and clustering Zope.org

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And Now For Something Completely Different:

Zope Status

by Brian Lloyd

Summary

Getting ready for 2.2.3

Recent News

Last week saw a number of new proposals in the Fishbowl at dev.zope.org. Fred Drake, a newly acquired member of the DC team added a proposal for Structured Documents that can interoperate with a wide range of tools and render themselves in a "variety of formats",

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/StructuredDocument

Ken Manheimer started the Wiki for now proposal, aimed at resolving some of the immediate shortcomings of the current Wiki product regarding its use for dev.zope.org. The idea here is to spend a short amount of time fixing the most painful problems that impede progress in the Fishbowl.

Documentation is currently a weak area for Zope. Ironically, the problem really isn't a lack of content, its a lack of organization among those who produce useful documentation. The current documentation "process" is not well-defined, so Amos and Michel have started a Fishbowl project to develop and formalize the process of producing Zope documentation. The end result of this will be a well-known and discoverable process that will allow the community to take better advantage of the documentation energy out there:

Jeffrey Shell continues to make progress on analysis on the Write Locking project to support DAV-aware Web tools that require DAV locking support on the server:

HiperLogica and Martijn Pieters are working on fleshing out the HiperDom project and moving various bits of HiperDom info into the Fishbowl. Zopistas interested in this project to add XMLC-like templating to Zope should visit the new HiperDom development home and get their licks in now while the requirements are being formalized.

Also, Adam Davis has sent a final request for comment on his proposal for several quick fixes that we could make to the Zope management interface to improve productivity in the 2.3 release timeframe.

Near Future

I had hoped to get 2.2.3 out this week, but there are still a few loose ends to tie up. I hope to (finally) get the fix for the infamous "__call__" bug included among other things.

We have started some work behind the scenes to apply better organization to dev.zope.org to make it easier to find what you are looking for and to get "at a glance" status for various projects and proposals. Some of this will be bound up with the "Wiki for now" project, but there will be at least some organizational progress before that project is finished.

Documentation

by Michel Pelletier

Amos and I spend much of last week not working on the book (yeah, we couldn't believe it either). Although we did handle the usual dozen or so comments, suggestions, and revisions sent to us by you wonderful community people about the book, most of our time was spent writing up a proposal and prototype for the Brand Spankin' New Digital Creations Documentation Process. What is that, you ask?

As it stands Digital Creations has no process for authoring, editing, delivering, or maintaining, documentation. This, obviously, creates lots of problems. How many resources to we throw at documentation? How is it done? Who edits it, and when? Where can it be found? Who is it intended for?

Over the past year, Amos and I have worked up a specific instance of a documentation process for developing a Zope book. After some consideration, and meta-thought, we have put together a proposal and prototype documentation process. For the OO-illuminati among you, you can think of this as a class that defines a generic process which will be used in certain instances to create documentation artifacts (for example, we used it to create the Zope Book).

But obviously Amos and I have experience writing only one artifact, so we need your help to make this process a real thing that will really help. So check it out over at dev.zope.org and tell us what you think.

Many thanks, and on that note, what ZWN would be complete without me plugging the Zope Book at least once? But I do have some real news, it looks like O'Reilly has decided that the book title will be Zope: The Definitive Guide, which is a bit of a misnomer because it isn't definitive, it's didactic. But the marketroids hath spoke, and so it shall be. Till next week.

-- by Ethan Fremen

How Many Zopatistas?

Zope gets downloaded from zope.org 12-15,000 times a month. It has risen steadily over the last year and a half. Zope has been downloaded roughly 200,000 times since version 2.0.

Zope is distributed on all major linux distributions, but there's no way of tracking those.

Netcraft asserts that there are 937 servers reporting themselves as zope

Note that this only works for proxy-passed or naked zopes, not pc/fast-cgi'd sites. For example, CodeIt shows up as Apache. Another reason to encourage the practice of proxy-passing :) I think it may be safe to assume that at most, 1/2 of live zope sites use proxy passing.

There are 1617 members of [email protected] and 409 members of zope-dev. There are 200,000 unique visits to zope.org every month (ok, that's a record :).

Therefore, I believe there are at least 2000 zope sites and 10,000 - 20,000 people who have used zope at least once, though they may not admit it if they're running for election.

Zope Heads East for Winter

Zope is finally going to be moving to a three-system cluster! When you've got a completely dynamic website with over 10,000 pages of content, 256mb ram just doesn't cut it any more.

We've got a nice system up with the folks at baymountain.com, which includes one Storage Server and two ZEO Client servers, in the addition to a load balancer. This way, no spider should get in our way, and as our usage grows, we'll just be able to add more commodity boxen as ZEO clients to handle the load!

You can go visit our tenuous migration plan as long as you promise to remember that the best laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley.

Vote!

Here's something for all you international folks who're sick and tired of United States elections, and something more important for those of you who've made the choice between Gush or Bore: Renaming Python Methods.

Python Methods have a poor name, because you can have a python method that lives on the filesystem. Furthermore, we're going to have Perl methods soon, and maybe tcl methods and java methods and Assembly methods... ok, probably not assembly methods.

Anyway, take the poll, and help decide what- if anything- methodish objects in zope should be called.

Documentation Overview

Rik Hoekstra has submitted a rough draft of the Documentation Overview: Take a look at it and send in your comments

-EOT-