Metadata, Developer's Guide update, new Zope.org progress, Lots of Page Template Proposals, and more in this week's news.

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

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Zope Developer's Guide

by Michel Pelletier

I'm happy to announce a new release of the Zope Developer's Guide, available in HTML format

The new guide contains many improvements and elaborations over the previous HTML release, and has benefited from the review and contributions from many community members including well-known object-orienteers Jim Fulton, Guido van Rossum and Bruce Eckel.

This will be the last "preview" release of the Dev guide before we release the first edition alongside the release of Zope 2.4.

As usual, any problems suggestions should be noted in the SourceForge tracker

CMF News

by Seb and Jon

Traffic on zope-cmf was a little calmer this week, and the majority of it seemed to come from people noticing that the CMFDecor product doesn't work. Andrew suggests removing the CMF Decor folder for now. In the mean time, don't worry - it's not an essential part of the CMF.

Workgroups

It's not always clear how to apply Zope's Security machinery to workgroup scenarios. Jens posted his ideas for implementing Workgroups in CMF. Shane showed how you might accomplish a similar thing using his cutting-edge DCWorkflow. The discussion continued in a slightly different direction following Scott's post on subjects/metadata. Will CMF become the "weapon of choice" for intranet managers?

Metadata - The Next Generation

The use and application of Dublin Core Metadata has come under scrutiny this week. Tim Lynch posted some useful background information on the uses of Dublin Core in the "World Outside CMF" (tm) - to which Tres responded with more details of DC's perspective on the DC.

Subclassing the DublinCore each time you want to extend it can be a bit of a pain. Shane proposes a new implementation; Tres turns fashion-guru and introduces aspect bags - every well dressed content-object will be carrying one this summer. Aspect oriented programming? Lesser mortals reach for their dictionaries!

Bite-Sized Chunks

Seb released a first cut of his Mailin Product. We're one step closer to updating from the beach! Chris W leaked the news that Swishdot will incorporate this functionality, giving a mailinglist/weblog cross - genetic-engineering at its best!

Some useful tips from Jeff on how to get CMFWiki working from CVS... and Tres clarifies DC's thinking on the future of this product. In short, you can use it, but it's not supported officially.

Zopefish dives into CMF. Onlookers drool at the prospect of Zopefish/CMF integration! Has anyone told Dave Winer?

Marc's Colour-Guide undergoes cosmetic surgery, courtesy of Dr Grifter.

Are you thinking of running several CMFs in the same Zope instance? Want to share common skins? So does Chris W - Shane suggests filesystem-based skins

The CMF Dogbowl Calendar is up and running. One to watch for forthcoming Zope-related events.

Silly Stats

(last week's figures in brackets):

      159 messages (350)
      42 people posted (50)
      55% were by 12% of people (70%:40%)
      8 bugs were resolved (?)
      3 were submitted (?)

Page Templates

Page Templates are already quite useful, but there's been a lot of activity lately on proposed changes including

• Replace Inner Text -- editors tend to be a touch indiscriminant about how they mark up code: your attribute markup can have font tags and other markup inserted inside it. What should happen then?
• Variable Expansion in Paths -- it would be nice if the path could include components that are actually variables.
• Disappearing tags -- it would be nice if some marked up tags went away after they are done doing their dynamic thing. A new tal attribute and a block tag have been proposed as solutions.
• Search And Replace -- somewhat related to the prior issue, having some way of specifying placeholders that indicate items to be replaced in non-marked up text (think JavaScript) would be nice.
• Commenting -- A tal:comment directive?

There's more! Go to the page templates project and join in the discussion.

Zope Web

by Ethan Fremen

Zope.org enhancement

Skin Madness ...Page Templates are a lot of fun. At the end of this project you'll be able to view_source on the zope.org site and get loads of good ZPT examples!

The workflow has received a lot of work, thanks to Jens Vagelpohl. Work on a redirector to support the migration machinery is also near completion, thanks to Andreas Jung.

-EOT-