Zope at the European LinuxTag 2000 (29th of June - 2nd of July)

Zope was part of the European LinuxTag 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany. On the four days of the show both commercial companies and the Open Source and Free Software communities came together to show their activity surrounding GNU/Linux to the 17.000 visitors.

We had many Zope developers coming from all over Germany, but also from as far away as France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, who helped organizing the conference, man the Zope booth at the Open Source Pavillion, give talks and hold BOF sessions. Besides demonstrating Zope to the visitors of LinuxTag, we had a lot of opportunity to meet fellow European Zope developers, and many fruitful discussions arose. We finally got to meet each other in real life after having known each other a long time on the mailing lists.

On the 29th of June, the first European ZopeCon took place with talks and a tutorial track. We counted 20 to 40 people in the talks, and around 12 people in the tutorial track, which was somewhat surprising, given the fact that we had less than four weeks time for preparing the whole event.

The ZopeCon talks opened with an introduction to Zope by Thilo Mezger from innominate AG. Then Mechthild Hofmann, a journalist and web designer, talked about her reasons for using Zope. Next came Ryan Hughes from Neuberger & Hughes, who spoke about the soon to be released version 2.0 of Worldpilot. With Worldpilot, you can manage e-mail over an IMAP server, access your addresses, keep track of todo-lists and make use of a calendar.

The next talk was given by Robert Segall, who spoke in an amusing way about his experiences of realizing e-commerce sites with Zope, and about his difficulties getting ISPs to host Zope sites. His tip: You should not mention to your ISP that Zope is this cool web application server! Instead, just say it's simple CGI script. A question came what to do about Apache configuration in that case. It's easy: you call the support line of the ISP and ask them to add a small line in the Apache configuration file, because you have some problem with your new account ;-). In Robert's own words: it's easy! Robert hopes he can release the code for his electronic commerce sites as Open Source.

Then there was a talk by Jan Haul about realizing projects in a company, followed by Martijn Faassen, who talked about XML and Zope. Zope is moving towards a system where you can treat Zope objects as XML and XML as Zope objects. This combination will have powerful applications for both XML and Zope. The last Zope talk was given by Joachim Werner from Ioveno, who described what role Zope plays in his business model.

In the tutorial sessions Stephan Richter from Digital Creations, Martijn Faassen and Joachim Werner from Iuveno held a question and answer session about a wide variety Zope issues. There were also BOF sessions about Zope, Zope and e-commerce and Zope documentation from friday to sunday. These often moved from their true topic into ad-hoc tutorials on Zope.

Overall we think Zope at LinuxTag was a great success! As a result, we're now in the process of organizing an EuroZope community with mailinglist and website, partially so we can better prepare for future European Zope gatherings, and partially because we had so much fun getting to know each other.