History for PeriodEnding4September2000

??changed:
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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",
      http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/ZWiki/NewPTKArchitecture,
     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",
       http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001341.html
      to the "actions list", in order to avoid confusion with the "portal
      tools."

   * Bill Anderson "released a new version",
      http://www.zope.org/Members/Bill/News/MembershipRelease-075
      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",
      http://www.squishdot.org/968089230/index_html, a successor to
     the popular Squishdot weblog product, to be built around the
     PTK.

   * Tres Seaver "proposed",
      http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001430.html
      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":http://purl.org/DC.

   * A "long thread",
     http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001461.html
     on "hooking" various portal actions resulted in a "proposal",
      http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001493.html
     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