by Chris McDonough ([email protected])

Welcome to the Zope News for August 17, 2001! The top stories this time around include: Zope 2.4.0 released, Digital Creations pulls a name change, two security hotfixes released, documentation updates, ZDP alive?, EuroZope eats out, components are on the brain, Zope.org attacked by morons, more on opening up CVS, Zope 2.5 plan published, and the Zope "Weekly" News changes hands.

And now for something completely different...

What Is Zope?

Zope is an open source web application server that can be used for managing website content, building intranets, and creating portals. For more information, see http://www.zope.org

Zope is built using the Python programming language. For Python information, see http://www.python.org

Front Matter

A change of editorship has befallen the Zope News. Zope News readers will sadly no longer be treated to the deadpan editorial stylings of Ethan "Mindlace" Fremen, whose steady hand has guided the ZWN since what seems like the dawn of time. Ethan has retired to the Ukraine to live out the rest of his days as a feudal lord, and in doing so, has passed the editorial baton to me (Chris McDonough). The king is dead, long live the king!

As a part of this editorship turnover, the Zope (ahem) "Weekly" News is changing its name to the Zope News in light of and in reverence to its not-so-weekly appearance. It will be produced biweekly from now on, and is meant to be released on the first and third Fridays of every month. If we miss the biweeklies.. well, at least nobody can make fun of the name!

The change in editorship means that the content and format of the News is changing slightly to include "almanac" content from Zope.org as well as summations of interesting Zope maillist discussions. Hope you enjoy!

Zope Core Development and Releases

Zope 2.4.0 was released on July 23. You can download it from http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.4.0/

New Features include:

• Zope 2.4 supports (and requires) Python 2.1
• New restricted execution architecture
• WebDAV Level 2 locking support
• New "WebDAV Access" permission
• A new built-in Authenticated role
• Product refresh without restart during development
• New "Drop-in indexes" support for ZCatalog

Read more about the new release at http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.4.0/zope_240_released

Zope 2.4.1, a minor bugfix release, is reportedly due in a matter of days.

Zope Corp's Zope 2.5 development plan, which showcases new features slated to be added to the next major Zope release, is online. See http://dev.zope.org/Resources/zope_250_plan.html for the whole scoop. One of the important items slated for inclusion into Zope 2.5 is Zope Page Templates. ZPT is a technology which allows HTML designers and programmers to work together to create presentation and logic without stepping on each others' toes.

Relatedly, a new release of Zope Page Templates that works with already-existing Zopes, ZPT 1.4, is out. See the Zope Page Templates Wiki for release and download details: http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZPT/FrontPage .

Other Development

Phabric, a project which has as its essential goal the porting of Zope to Jython (the Python language as implemented in Java) has been announced. The project is sponsored by a company named WebElite. See http://www.phabric.org for more information.

Brian Lloyd has done a lot of work coming up with a reasonable proposal for better Zope web services. See http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/WebServicesForZope

Michael Bernstein is raising a ruckus on various lists with his SecurityJihad proposal See http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/SecurityJihad .

Jeffrey Shell proposes unification of the tests that ship with the Zope core. http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/CleanUpAndUnifyCoreUnitTests

Toby Dickinson proposes a transactional email capability. http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/TransactionalEmail

Security Notices

Two security hotfixes have been released since the last Zope News. It's recommended you check them out and install them if necessary.

http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/Hotfix_2001-07-25/security_alert

http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/Hotfix_2001-08-04/security_alert

Documentation Development and Releases

Although it was covered in the last Zope News, it bears repeating that the printed version of "The Zope Book" by Michel Pelletier and Amos Latteier became widely available in bookstores not too long ago. This is the dead-tree version of the content available from http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/ . If you buy it, maybe Michel will be able to afford a laptop on which he can run a better window manager than twm. ;-)

The Zope Developer's Guide and Zope Book have been updated to match the features of Zope 2.4. See http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZDG and http://www.zope.org/Members/Amos/ZopeBook24 . Thanks to Amos Latteier and Michel Pelletier.

The Zope Documentation Project (http://zdp.zope.org) seems to have stalled almost entirely. The last update to any of its content appears to have been made in May! Egads. Alestay ontentcay entralcay!

News Summaries

Erik Enge's zope-dev maillist summary for July was relased. It's available at http://nittin.net/erik/summaries/2001-08-01 .

Seb Bacon's CMF Week In Review #6 for the week ending July 27 is available from http://cmf.zope.org/news/weekly/20010727..

Digital Creations Goings-On

Digital Creations, Inc. (the producer of Zope) has changed it's name to "Zope Corporation". There is a new website at http://www.zope.com accordingly. The name change is intended to ensure that Zope (the application) and its primary financial backer are more closely associated with each other in the marketplace. See http://www.zope.com/News/PressReleases/DC2ZC for more info.

A components architecture chat was had with Jim Fulton and Shane Hathaway from DC/ZC with the rest of the Zope community on August 3rd. A log of the chat is available at http://irclogs.espnow.com/zope-logs/show_file.php?logfile=Aug_03_2001.log.. For the most part, Shane and Jim explained the content in the Zope Component Architecture wiki (see http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/FrontPage), which really essentially just turns out to be a set of best practices to use when developing Zope applications, as well as a set of enabling technologies.

Ken Manheimer continues to plug away at opening up the CVS repository to contibutions external to and unmediated by Zope Corporation. A record of his travails is available at http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZopeCVSMigration/CurrentStatus..

EuroZope Goings-On

This happened a while back (a whole month ago!), but was neglected mention in any prior Zope News. The EuroZope crew (http://www.eurozope.org ) had a barbeque in Berlin. There are pictures. They are mostly incriminating, and they feature about four thousand shots of Noa Harvey, which is fine with me. See http://adequat.c2a.fr/presentation/ZopeBerlin for the pics. Also a great shot of Michel Pelletier somewhere in here.

Zope News Sightings

A slightly "trollish" article at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/14/2327248&mode=flat about web services in relation to open source software posted on LinuxToday and Slashdot generated lots of heat within those communities. Lots of (sane) people argued within the respective site talkback threads that "the answer is Zope."

A bit of Linux Weekly News coverage at http://lwn.net/2001/features/oreilly2001/ of the latest O'Reilly Open Source conference deals with presentations given by Zope Corp folks. A bad picture of Tres Seaver and a good picture of Jim Fulton are contained within.

Because I'm a Zopeaholic, I like to visit the Netcraft website (http://www.netcraft.net) every month to see how many folks are using Zope. Though their numbers don't take into account all the Zope sites behind Apache or other web or proxy servers, it's somewhat interesting all the same. See http://www.netcraft.com/survey/Reports/200107/byserver/Zope/index.html for Zope stats for July.

Zope.org Meta Matter

A small collection of morons is busy abusing Zope.org's "openness". This group uses Zope.org as a "warez" repository, creating throwaway accounts and storing large files in the various Member areas associated with these accounts. The large files are then downloaded many times by other morons. All of this activity takes up lots of disk space, bandwidth and other system resources. The Zope.org staff is busy fending off the onslaught. And they say open source software doesn't cost money! [;-)]

Webalizer traffic statistics output for the systems that make up www.zope.org is available at http://ns1.zope.org:82/

Zope.org Almanac

The Zope.org Almanac lists select new or updated content spotted on Zope.org since the last release of the Zope News.

Selected News Items

Zope Training in Berlin, Germany - Paris, and Washington D.C.

http://www.zope.org/Members/beehive/berlindcparis.html

ZWiki 0.9.4 released

http://www.zope.org/Members/simon/ZWiki/ZWiki-0.9.4-released

Monthly DC Zope User Group Meeting

http://www.zope.org/Members/chrisa/aug21zpug

New Or Updated How-Tos

Virtual Hosts via Apache (but nearly all content in Zope)

http://www.zope.org/Members/mwr/VHosts_With_Zope_Default

SSL Certificate Authentication

http://www.zope.org/Members/zhivago/SSLCertAuth/How-To_SSLCertAuth

How to compile/link DynPersist on win32 using MS VC 6.0

http://www.zope.org/Members/isalsberg/PTK/How-To_DynPersist

Zope and SSL

http://www.zope.org/Members/Ioan/ZopeSSL

METAL for Beginners

http://www.zope.org/Members/tone/METAL

Medusa Status HowTo

http://www.zope.org/Members/mvalente/medusastatus

How to create boring CMF content based on the filesystem

http://www.zope.org/Members/eenge/CMFBoringContent

A very minimal Product

http://www.zope.org/Members/maxm/HowTo/minimal_01

Migrate from ZPyGreSQL database adaptor to Psycopg PostgreSQL adaptor

http://www.zope.org/Members/aho/oio_utils/ZPyGreSQL_to_ZPsycopg

Selected New Or Updated Software Products

Photo

http://www.zope.org/Members/Drew/Photo

Updated FScounter

http://www.zope.org/Members/bowerymarc/FScounter

PictureLink

http://www.zope.org/Members/mavron/PictureLink

Simple XML Searcher

http://www.zope.org/Members/cabbie/SimpleXmlSearcher

A RAM Cache Manager that ages objects

http://www.zope.org/Members/xgwsbae/RamCacheManagerWithAge

ReplaceSupport

http://www.zope.org/Members/shh/ReplaceSupport

ZODB-CORBA Connection

http://www.zope.org/Members/jheintz/ZODB_CORBA_Connection

MySQL user folder

http://www.zope.org/Members/vladap/mysqlUserFolder

CallableFolder

http://www.zope.org/Members/shh/CallableFolder

SessionDataContainerBase

http://www.zope.org/Members/shai/SessionDataContainerBase

Oracle-based Session Data Container

http://www.zope.org/Members/shai/SqlSDC

Xron Scheduled Method Dispatcher

http://www.zope.org/Members/lstaffor/Xron

Binary release of Zope-2.4.0 for MOSX

http://www.zope.org/Members/sspickle/Zope-2.4.0-MOSX-ppc

Formulator

http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/Formulator

Portail Pour Tous (Portal For All)

http://www.zope.org/Members/dgeorgieff/popoto

CMF Complex Document

http://www.zope.org/Members/snej/CMFComplexDocument

Product View

http://www.zope.org/Members/srichter/Products/ProductView

FormsTool for CMF

http://www.zope.org/Members/jack-e/CMFFormsTool

Zope/Java-Based Telnet/SSH

http://www.zope.org/Members/dshaw/ZJavaTelnetSSH

HTMLDocument

http://www.zope.org/Members/sf/HTMLDocument

Zope ODBC Database Adapter

http://www.zope.org/Products/DA/ZODBCDA

Document Library

http://www.zope.org/Members/Kaivo/DocumentLibrary

ZOracleDA

http://www.zope.org/Members/zigg/ZOracleDA-zigg

SOAP Methods as external methods

http://www.zope.org/Members/xgwsbae/SOAPMethod

Tamino-Zope

http://www.zope.org/Members/pbolle/Tamino-Zope

DCOracle2

http://www.zope.org/Members/matt/dco2

Site Tracker Product

http://www.zope.org/Members/peterbe/SiteTrackerProduct

CMF-based Address Book

http://www.zope.org/Members/natsukashi/Products/CMFUsrManOrg

Caches documents via a mod_perl module for Apache

http://www.zope.org/Members/xgwsbae/ZopeProxyCacheManager

[email protected] Mail List Summary for August 1- 17

People can't get enough of drinking from the firehose that is the [email protected] mail list! There've been roughly 3000 messages posted since July 20, 2001 (the day of the last Zope News). Interesting messages and threads include those below.

A thread about Java applets to be used as content editors

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096655.html

Peter Bengtsson explains how to use _.getitem

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096658.html

bak@kedai and Olivier Bleutgen praise mod_gzip in concert with Zope

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096661.html

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096664.html

Steve Spicklemire and I come to the rescue for Gerd Zeif with _SUPPRESS_ACCESSRULE and other things to do when you get locked out

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096670.html

The answer to the above shocks and dismays Shai Berger

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096748.html

J Cameron Cooper explains how to install CMF under Windows

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096687.html

A long-lasting and lively discussion about using Zope for nonprofits

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096690.html

Jcc also discusses the emergency user

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096695.html

Timothy Wilson discourses on vs DTML syntax

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096714.html

Andreas Jung explains how to grab content from an HTTP server

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096733.html

David Lutz asks advice writing a comparison between Zope and Notes

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096760.html

An intensely boring argument breaks out about Linux large file support

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096816.html

I attempt to evade questions about Zope Version objects

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096869.html

David Lambert asks questions about namespaces and receives answers

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096868.html

Terry McKenna attempts to get ZSQL working with PostgreSQL

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096891.html

Tommy Johnson get answers about publisher method marshalling

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096923.html

Jcc answers Michael Montagne's question about security by recommending local roles

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096773.html

Dieter Maurer amazingly spots a syntax error that Guido might have had trouble spotting [;-)]

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/096957.html

A thread about distinguishing Zope (the company) from Zope (the software and associated community) arises

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097025.html

Jens Vagelpohl explains how to prevent TCP access to Zope

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097036.html

I describe when and how to use the profiler

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097131.html

Tino helps mixo out with groups/roles

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097208.html

Tino helps out Artur Mozdzynski with cookies

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097212.html

The orphan option default value (3) to dtml-in is crucified

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097212.html

Tino helps Todd Loomis turn a set of checkboxes on a form into a list

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097405.html

Dieter laments that more people don't use ZopeFind to search a Zope

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097426.html

Steve Spicklemire helps Fritz Mesedilla find docs on Structured Text

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097463.html

Jcc gets jiggy explaining how to connect MS Access and Zope

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097516.html

Casey Duncan answers questions about creating a disk-based Zope product

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097585.html

Jason Witt claims Zope is SLAB on Solaris, and obtains confirmatory testimonials

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097561.html

End Matter

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

If you or your company are doing something interesting with Zope, please submit a blurb to Zope Weekly News for possible inclusion by emailing Chris McDonough (mailto:[email protected] ).

For older editions of the Zope News, see the archives at http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/