Zope 2.3.2 coming along and 2.4 roadmap explained, Page Templates 1.1, Content Management Framework news, Zope buzz in the media, and Zope.org holds a memorial for dearly departed members.

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:

Upcoming Events

The EuroZope crew is organizing a two day Zope only conference in Berlin on the 12th and 13th of July.

Those interested in participating should join the discussion on the EuroZope mailinglist

Zope in the Press

by Adam Davis

Zope and Digital Creations have recently benefited from a surge of attention from the technical press:

ZDnet's Linux News posted an article about why the economic downturn may be good for open source software, specifically Zope

ZD TV also caught up with Digital Creations at InternetWorld in Los Angeles, CA. There is a video of a demonstration of the new Zope-based CMF (and accompanying transcript) on the zcast.tv site

TechReviews.com also covered Zope extensively in a recent article

Zope Page Templates

by Evan Simpson

ZPT is now at version 1.1.1, which differs from 1.0.0 mostly in bugfixes. TAL is at 1.1.0, and continues to improve its parsing of HTML. The one major change in behaviour is the removal of METAL and TAL tags from rendered output. My plans for the next week include the addition of new batching and tree-tag-like capabilities. If you haven't tried Page Templates yet, please do! They are shaping up nicely. Reminder to Unix users: don't unpack tarballs as root, since that creates useless file ownership and breaks ZPT.

Zope Status

by Brian Lloyd

Summary

Zope 2.3.2 coming, 2.4 on the horizon

Recent News

This week's not-so-weekly update: we are finishing up work on various issues people have had with Zope 2.3.1, and are planning on a Zope 2.3.2 beta early next week (week of the 16th). The 2.3.2 release is focused on a relatively small number of specific issues that have impeded progress for some people - the plan is to release the beta and, if all goes well, release a final (with no changes from the beta) a week or so later.

The "no changes between last beta and final" approach is one that we are going to adopt from now on. Even seemingly dead-simple bug fixes can turn into (different) bugs, and being very strict about allowing any changes between a final beta and a release will produce fewer surprises. I need to update the official release policy to reflect this.

Some of the up-front analysis and planning work for Zope 2.4 has already begun - if you haven't seen it, the initial Zope 2.4 plan is online at dev.zope.org

The major goal of Zope 2.4 will be to "officially" support (and require) Python 2.1. This is a controversial point with a few people - controversy is OK, but please let the controversy play out in the correct place

An important function of the Fishbowl process is to capture a historical record of the development and decision-making process regarding product activities. We want to make sure that we capture that process in the project, not leave it floating around in the mailing lists.

In other controversies, there is a proposal for an extended DTML sorting syntax by Oleg Broytmann in the Fishbowl

Please weigh in with your opinion on this issue and help us work out a decision!

Content Management Framework

by Shane Hathaway

This week saw a lot of activity on the CMF. We're getting good feedback regarding CMF 1.0. The questions asked on the zope-cmf list have helped us to narrow down which areas of the framework need documentation and improvements the most, so keep 'em coming!

We've been working on a migration script for converting pre-1.0 sites to 1.0. It's not as easy as past upgrades since the name of the product changed (from "PTK".) As soon as the script is working well we intend to migrate cmf.zope.org, which already has significant content and membership, to CMF version 1.0. Future upgrades will be easier.

Other work done recently:

• A new product called "CMFDecor" was released in CVS (alongside CMFCore and CMFDefault). It uses Zope Page Templates to skin a CMF site. ZPT and the CMF make a great combination.
• Speed optimizations and bugfixes have been checked in, in preparation for CMF 1.1.

Zope Web

by Ethan Fremen

Dead Users Buried

There were about 13,000 users that had not logged in in 2 months. Last Thursday, we sent out a warning that their accounts would be purged - and nearly 3,000 logged in. The remaining 10,000 users have been purged, paving the way for the LDAP migration.

-EOT-