Ken Manheimer's zope.org home page - Members/klm

Ken Manheimers's member page

General stuff i do or have done at/for Zope Corp:

Conversations With Zope - A wiki for my PyCon 2003 paper on python-prompt and pdb debugging techniques for Zope, and related incidentals. The wiki includes the paper, some of the ingredients of a recipe included in the paper for creating a ZEO-based Zope site, and notes and errata for the paper.
What is Zope? - An epiphany i had about what Zope actually does. (Warning: the realization may so ideosyncratic as to be meaningful only to me!)
Sundry Emacs Goodies -
I've been responsible for development and maintenance of some collaborative-development facilities which Zope Corp uses for public and customer projects, including:

Issue collector

A basic issue tracking facility based in the CMF. See http://collector.zope.org . Also, i originally developed the predecessor as a ZClass: http://www.zope.org/Members/klm/TrackerWiki/FrontPage - the original version had some nice features missing in the new one, and vice versa, but i wouldn't wish ZClass maintenance headaches on anyone, so recommend the collector

Structured Wikis

Most of the stuff i developed for WikiForNow and predecessors have been integrated back into ZWiki , on which WikiForNow is based.
zope.org uses these wikis extensively - now zwiki with the additions.

CVS collaboration provisions

I developed and maintain the custom CVS-based provisions for Zope's public repositories described at http://dev.zope.org/CVS (with similar arrangements used also for Zope Corp's customer projects)
We should eventually be migrating to more modern emerging source version control like SubVersion and it's about time. There's talk about that happening soon, but so far it's just talk.

Zope and Python debugging techniques and tools

I've written about and had a hand in developing some of the tools and techniques which facilitate debugging Zope and Python code. Follow the link to see a paper i presented at PyCon 2003 collecting together these topics.
(For Emacs users - if you have a recent version of python-mode (you can get the latest at the sourceforge project ) - it turns emacs into an on-screen source code debuggerin. With it loaded, if you step through a program with pdb in a shell (or python-interaction) buffer, it will display a cursor tracking the pdb lines in the source file. It has special provisions to track stepping through Zope python-scripts that live in the ZODB or are skin scripts, if you put a copy of the python script in a python-mode buffer with the name of the function. Quite very handy for Zope debugging, in general.)

Customer projects:

Boston.com - a core developer
CyberCamp - Team Lead / Core Developer
ZapMedia - Team Lead / customer liason and moderate developer
I've also done some sundry small gigs here and there (including some recent involvement in Zope4Intranets, which was particularly fun)

Overarching thing i'm interested in doing:

OrganizationObjects: Many of my work efforts have focused on structuring collaboration - list management, issue tracking, news-site production, wiki - i even see the CVS provisions i arranged fitting within this general concern. For each application, i developed a new content type (or built on top of a specialized content type, as with CVS), and winding up with a content, organizational, and procedural framework that i could not easily use across applications. I could not easily incorporate the particular features i needed at any moment for a effort at hand.
Providing a basis for building content which could use any and all of these features at any moment has become a sort of holy grail for me. I expressed my take of the way to achieve this goal in my OrganizationObjects proposal. Many of the ideas - eg, event-triggered relationship tracking - are emerging in the implementation of Zope3. (This is probably due both to responding to the same forces which spurred my proposal, and to some degree the fact of the proposal and my advocacy of these things, in general.) I have yet to see the goal realized, but can see ways to get there, and am eager to advance it.

If you want to know more about me (perhaps more than you might wish:), NewsForge's Julie Bresnick did a personality profile on me in her series on open-source programmer profiles,