PeriodEnding4September2000

State of the PTK, 2000/09/04

In the weeks since our last report, the PTK community has been quite busy:

• Shane Hathaway landed the proposed next-generation architecture refactoring the "toolkit" as a set of "portal tools", each providing services to other objects in the portal. The tools include:

  portal_membership

  tracks personalization and owned content, tying them (much more loosely) to the AUTHENTICATED_USER.

  portal_registration

  implements portal-specific policies for user signup, password generation/mailng, etc.

  portal_workflow

  encapsulates the workflow policies of the portal

  portal_catalog

  indexes portal content

  portal_discussions

  implements portal policies for types of content which are "discussable", and how they are linked to their discussion threads.

  portal_actions

  list context-specific actions for portal objects.

  portal_undo

  provide a portal-friendly interface to Zope's undo machinery.

  Each of these tools is represented as an interface in the PTKBase product, with a sample implementation (typically preserving the "old" policies/semantics) in the PTKDemo or DemoPortal products. The single most attractive feature of the design is that portal managers can replace these tools on a per-portal basis.

• Fabio Forno provided invaluable aid in debugging the new tools.

• One noticeable result of the new architecture is the renaming of the toolbox to the "actions list", in order to avoid confusion with the "portal tools."

• Bill Anderson released a new version of the Membership product, upgrading it to "beta" status. This product uses ZPatterns to manage member registration and logins, and is on a trajectory for eventual reintegration with the new PTK Architecture.

• Chris Withers announced Swishdot a successor to the popular Squishdot weblog product, to be built around the PTK.

• Tres Seaver proposed revamping the implementation of the Dublin Core metadata within the PTK, in order to bring it closer into line with the intent of the spec.

• A long thread on "hooking" various portal actions resulted in a proposal to create an "event channel" object, portal_events, as another tool.

PTK Tracker Vitals, 2000/09/04 (since 2000/07/25)

Here is is the current state of the tracker:

  Type / Status   New     Closed     Current
    Bug Reports     5          3            26
    Feature/Doc
       Requests    0         0           14