The Content Management Framework formerly known as PTK, Zope 2.3.1 beta is out, Presentation Templates will save us, Zope.org stabilized, all in this week's Zope News.

The opinions expressed in Zope News are solely the authors', and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope Community at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition.

If you or your company are doing something cool with zope, submit it to Zope News for possible inclusion.

And Now For Something Completely Different:

Zope Presentation Templates

-- by Ethan Fremen

Zope Presentation Templates now in an alpha release, have the promise of both replacing dtml and integrating well with wysiwyg tools, like Adobe GoLive.

I'm really excited about this project: it should go a long way towards us being able to have real separation of logic, presentation, and data.

The basic idea is that attributes in a namespace will control manipulation of nodes in a native XML namespace: the most common example will be XHTML.

This means that you'll no longer have a page so saturated with additional tags that you cannot identify the underlying XHTML: instead, you'll have a well formed document that your editor can play nicely with.

A crude example is:

<p tal:insert="here/saying">Dummy Text</p>

Assuming the document had a property called "saying", with a value of "Hello World", the result would be:

<p>Hello World</p>

There are more examples including basic loop constructs.

After you download and try out the software, please give some feedback to the development project.

Zope Status

by Brian Lloyd

Summary

Zope 2.3.1 beta 1 released

Recent News

This week's not-so-weekly update: Thursday Feb. 15 we released beta 1 of Zope 2.3.1. 2.3.1 will follow in a week or so barring any problems.

The 2.3.1 release contains quite a number of bug fixes, both issues found during the upgrade cycle to 2.3 and quite a few older issues that had been languishing in the Collector. We anticipate that 2.3.1 will be quite solid, so we will be able to turn some attention to other things and start talking about some new longer-term initiatives for Zope.

The Content Management Framework Formerly Known as the PTK

--by Ethan Fremen

The CMF has been on the fast track for the past month or so. Tres reports that we should have a 1.0 release by the end of this month.

You can read all about it at the CMF dogbowl so today I'll just hilight one of the exciting things in the CMF: Access-based filtered searching.

An article that has just been written but not approved might appear in a list of to-be-approved items for an editor. This list is generated by a catalog query: however, a regular user, searching for articles, will not see the yet-approved article.

Perhaps once this article is published, it is in a members only area. Then, members will see it both in a catalog-driven list of content, but also in raw searches, yet it will remain invisible to the "Anonymous User".

I reviewed quite a few indexing engines a while ago. Finding one that stayed up-to date with the changes made to the site was hard enough (All CMF content is automatically catalogued): Finding one that gave a different set of results to different kinds of viewers was impossible.

Zope Web

--by Ethan Fremen

ZopeOrgBlowsUp

For the past few weeks, Zope.org has been rather unstable. I'm pretty confident in the zope software, and so I found this rather unnerving. I put some work into tracking it down, but Shane Hathaway really found the culprit, and Ken Manheimer finally put it to rest.

The new wikis had an infinite-recursion loop that was causing zope to segfault. Luckily, this has been corrected, and my pager has been silent since (yay!).

Cluster Grows

Zope.org's cluster is also getting a bit bigger: We're adding a new storage server so that the mail can have a machine to itself. Other benifits of the new server will be support for files greater than 2GB, so that zope.org will stop coming to a writing halt every time the database passes that point.

We're also adding another ZEO client box to the cluster that will allow us to have a place to do things (like load in all of the mailing list messages) that are a bit ... resource intensive.

Zope.org grows up

Since the CMF is nearing release status, it's high time that Zope.org starts moving in that direction. We're going to be building a new Zope.org off of this one-dot-oh release, so stay tuned for a lot of activity next month.

-EOT-