EuroZope barbecue coming soon, how to sell Zope to management types, Zope 2.4 beta 2 released, and CMF news and discussion in this week's ZWN

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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.

The full schedule is availiable featuring exiting topics, including Squishdot, Zope Components, Internationalization, SmartObjects, and more!

Get Zope T-shirts!

Ever have a hankering for a giant blue orb on your back? Well, now you can satisfy your craving. Score some Zope Shirts and you'll be set.

Selling Zope

There was an extensive discussion on how to sell Zope/OSS to management vs. proprietary packages. Chris McDonough framed the problem well: "Think of a high-level executive making a decision about buying a content management system like a foreigner on a business trip in a strange land. Everyone is bugging him to eat at their restaurant. He recognizes none of the names of these restaurants, and doesn't really even understand what kind of food each restaurant is selling. But then he sees the McDonald's "golden arches" (MS/IBM).. and he knows that. He knows McDonalds isn't the best food, but it's a safe bet in a foreign country when all he wants to do is eat and move on."

Charlie Blanchard asked where there were case studies or white papers: Stephen Goeldi suggested The Buisness Case for Linux and Open Source Software and Martijn Pieters pointed out that Digital Creations has several pdf files talking about various Zope technologies.

Jon Edwards pointed out that this is an area where Zope User's Groups could be helpful, in both profiling solutions and putting together brocures. Jerome Alet suggested a "brand your own brochure" that would let you download a marketing pdf branded with your companie's information.

Mike Krohn does a good analysis, saying "it is going to be a long time before Zope is seen as less risky than, say, Vignette. [...] So the major infrastucture for e-commerce in big corporates is not a market that Zope can make a big impression on directly. Need to slide round the side. [...] "Risk is less important on many intranet sites. Cost is important. Nimbleness is important. Zope could win here. We would have to be careful with the messages so as not to get cornered in a niche but it could lead to the big platform implementations, too."

Zope News

Zope 2.4 beta 2 has been released. Changes from beta 1:

• Some of the import shenanigans in ZService.py were still trying to load Python 1.5 versions of support dlls for running as a service under win32 (meaning you effectively couldn't).
• Collector entries 2342 & 2348 - StructuredTextNG fixes. Table-detection code used multi-arg appends and failed. doc_href() method did not pick up on URLs with query strings. Thanks to "datagrok"
• Collector #2335: older products like GadflyDA that did not use registerClass() were registered but their visibility flag has not been set to Global. So these products did not appear in the ZMI.
• Corrected handling of nested scopes in restricted code. The compiler did not correctly handle nested variables used in multiple child scopes.
• added WebDAV workaround for MSIE 6 beta unable to handle accented characters inside the CDATA section for the object properties
• fixed broken WebDAV support for GoLIVE unable to handle some object properties placed inside CDATA sections

CMF News

by Seb and Jon

This week, there were 195 posts, made by 57 people (35% of which were posted by 5% of the people).

How to achieve World Domination in 3 Easy Steps

Step 1 - Interoperability - There was some discussion about interoperability with other CMSes. Easing the pain of migrating between competing systems and the CMF could be a clear winner. However, perhaps a prerequisite of interoperability with the Big Playaz (Vignette, Broadvision) is a community standard for managing websites, rather than just content types?

At which point Jon whipped out his own fledgling CMS, and asked complete strangers to play with it... rumours that he is enticing potential collaborators with offers of sweeties and puppies are totally unfounded!

Step 2 - The Intranet/Extranet Market - Craig wondered how suitable the CMF was for corporate extranets. It emerged that several people were using it for this purpose.

The possibility that the CMF is currently more suited to corporate intranets than CMSs, out of the box, was raised by Seb, and this theme was picked up by Paul Everitt, as a possible market focus for the CMF (especially for SMEs).

Step 3 - Friends in High Places - Straight from the mouth of a self-confessed pooh-bah - "there's a big, big future for the CMF."

Look, it's working already! - Amidst all the advocacy musings was one particularly glowing comment from cameron::

"This is what Zope was born for, and I salute you"

At my signal, unleash hell!

New products / releases

• Blark Weblog / CMFOptions
• French CMF
• CMF Demo Product

Some CMF Sites

• http://newdaily.lwn.net/
• http://www.netkook.com
• http://iwethey.org:8080/forums (beta discussions based on sql backend)
• http://bill.noreboots.com
• http://www.libc.org
• http://www.immosys.com
• http://www.pricom.co.uk

Odds and Ends

There are some questions still looking for answers - in particular, How to grok Workflow (a brief answer appeared), Gregoire's workflow questions and how to get Stock Zope Objects into a CMF instance - lots of requests,

Idle wonderings about RSS feeds of the mailing list turned into a fullblown discovery of Ken's Stealth ZOMA.

Thoughts about an integrated spell checker ; better living through rationalised skins ; is the Undo UI useable ; some ideas about subscription ; and how to handle changes in the codebase gracefully.

Remi launched a thread about translating the CMF. It looks like there are, or will be, versions underway in French, Spanish and German.

Finally, there was some discussion about discussions - Seb and / or Chris will be having to write a new discussion tool soon, so any more input on this issue would be very welcome.

-EOT-