Zope Documentation Project (ZDP) Announcement

The Zope Documentation Project is pleased to announce the availability of the new http://zdp.zope.org website, which aims to give the Zope community an additional place for sharing knowledge, and for working together on providing good Zope documentation. The new ZDP homepage already contains many useful resources for the Zope community, which for the most part complement the already existing types of documentation available on zope.org.

We sincerely hope that Digital Creations will play an active role in the Zope Documentation Project and help merging the existing Zope documentation with the documentation provided via ZDP. To see what Digital Creation's Plans for Zope Documentation are, have a look at: http://www.zope.org/Members/Amos/Documentation/Plan

When we built the new ZDP site, great emphasis was placed on providing ways to easily get aware of what is new on the site and to quickly get an overview of what pieces of documentation need Maintainers, Writers, Commenters and Reviewers. Thereby contributors are directed to the documents and projects that need help. Everyone can contribute according to their interest and level of experience.

We invite you to join the ZDP and to help building up a great knowledge base on Zope. This also includes helping to customize and extend the ZDP-Tools, which is the software with which the ZDP site was built and on which it runs. The ZDP-Tools are being developed on-site, and are completely written in DTML to allow for rapid through-the-web programming. Questions on the ZDP tools can either be directed to the ZDP mailing list or to me, as I am the ZDP-Tools maintainer (Maik R�der, [email protected]).

The most important sub-projects of the Zope Documentation Project are:

1. ZBook
   In this project, we are collaboratively writing a book about Zope.
   There are already many chapters, most of which are still drafts.
   We need feedback on these drafts, so maybe you can give some 
   comments directly on the drafts, or discuss them on the ZDP mailing
   list or directly with the author. The ZBook project is maintained 
   by Tom Deprez ([email protected]). 



 ZFAQ
   This project tries to answer the frequently asked questions on Zope.
   The project is in need of additional contributors, so if you
   have a  question on Zope, or an answer to share, then you are
   welcome to add it to the ZFAQ. If you want to help moving the old
   Zope FAQ  to the new one, then just contact Kamon Ayeva
   ([email protected]), the maintainer of the ZFAQ project.

 ZSnippets
   Snippets are short pieces of DTML or Python code which come with a
   description of their purpose and how they work. This project is
   maintained by Rik Hoekstra ([email protected]), who will get
   an automatic email notification when you add a Snippet, so you are
   invited to help flooding his inbox ;-)

To become a ZDP member, write an email to the ZDP mailing list ([email protected]), and we will create an account for you. For the time being, this will give you Manager rights on zdp.zope.org. Once we use a tool like the forthcoming PTK Login Manager for automatically adding new members, we will have to give more restricted access rights.

Thanks go out to Digital Creations for sponsoring the ZDP server at Codeit Computing (http://www.codeit.com), a Zope Hosting Provider which is kindly giving the ZDP project commercial support for an Advanced Zope Hosting Server !

The ZDP site has not been tested under heavy load, so just in case you should experience down times, please report to the ZDP mailing list at [email protected], and come back later. If you should not be able to reach this site under the name zdp.zope.org, try using the IP address 209.185.210.24 in the meantime.

So, you are invited to visit us at:

http://zdp.zope.org

Best Regards,

Maik R�der