Zope 2.4 coming faster than you'd expect, Core Session Tracking is good for you, ZShell for the CLI lover, Formulator for form manipulation, and more in this Zope Weekly +1d News

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Upcoming Events

EuroZope Conference

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 Shell

The Zope Shell is a product that allows you to use unix shell commands to manipulate the ZODB from within Zope's management interface.

It has been under extremely heavy development, and aside from letting you do standard unix commands (like ls, cd, mkdir) it has:

• restart
• shutdown
• pack
• lrole (lists role)
• mkuf (make user folder)
• lsprop, delprop, addprop and setprop (all property commands)

Check it out - though better with a backup, as it can "possibly destroy your ZODB's contents when not used correctly".

Core Session Tracking

Core Session Tracking allows you to associate data objects with anonymous Zope visitors, allowing you to keep state about an anonymous user between request.

It uses four major components to achieve these ends:

• Session Id Manager -- This is what determines a remote client's session id, contained in a "session token", which can be a form or cookie variable. The way that the session id gets set is configurable by the site administrator- applications that use sessions will not need to know how the id is set.
• Session Data Manager -- This component actually hands session data to interested callers. Applications use methods on session data managers to get the session objects they care about.
• Session Data Container -- This is where session data objects are stored. Currently, there are two types: "Internal" session data containers are RAM-based, while "External" ones are persistent Zope objects. Session data containers are also responsible for expiring their session data objects, unless the objects are manually invalidated.
• Session Data Object -- This is what an application actually manipulates, once it has been retrieved from a session data manager. This is where the useful information is actually stored.

Zope Status

by Brian Lloyd

Summary

Marching on 2.4 and opening CVS

Recent News

Not too much to report this week - most of the major tasks for Zope 2.4 on Python 2.1 are either complete or nearly so. We are still on target for a May alpha (maybe even earlier than I thought originally). You can look at the 2.4 plan to follow the status of the 2.4 track

The Zope CVS Migration project is moving along - we are currently working out the requirments for the new repository structure. The needed infrastructure for the public CVS should land this week, and after that there are a number of documentation and coordination tasks.

In other Fishbowl news, I've finally gotten status assigned to all of the current proposals, and done editorial review on nearly all of them that were blocked waiting for that. I hope to be caught up with all proposals by the end of next week.

Formulator

by Martijn Faassen

On april 30 Formulator 0.9 was released. This is a complete reimplementation of ZFormulator. Formulator is a flexible and extensible framework for the creation and validation of forms. It integrates well with the Zope management interface. Online help is provided.

I'm looking for feedback on Formulator, both from people trying to use it as well as people trying to extend it with new fields in Python. So if you're curious, please go and check it out

Zope Web

by Ethan Fremen

Zope.org enhancement

The Zope.org Collaboration Enhancement has received a lot of work this week. Please consider visiting the project and letting us know what you think!

-EOT-