It is in our opinion that Zope 3.1 is more than ready for production use, which is why we decided to drop the X for experimental from the name. We will also continue to work on making the transition between Zope 2 and Zope 3 as smooth as possible. As a first step, Zope 2.8 includes Zope 3 features in the form of Five.

Please test this release carefully and send us any feedback! In particular, we have tried very hard to keep backward-compatibility with the previous X3 3.0 release, so please let us know if the new release breaks your code.

Downloads

http://zope.org/Products/Zope3/

Installation instructions for both Windows and Un*x/Linux are now available in the top level README.txt file of the distribution. The binary installer is recommended for Windows.

Zope 3.1 requires Python 2.3.5 or 2.4.1 to run. You must also have zlib installed on your system.

Most Important Changes Since 3.0

• New Pluggable Authentication Utility (PAU), which is similar in philosophy to the Zope 2 PAS. The following features are available in the in the basic PAU facility:

  + Credentials Plugins: Basic HTTP Auth, Session

  + Authenticator Plugins: Principal Folder, Group Folder

  For a detailed description of the pluggable authentication utility, see zope/app/authentication/README.txt.

• Major simplifications to the component architecture:

  + Removal of the concept of a service. All outstanding services were converted to utilities: Error Reporting, FSSync, Authentication.

  + Site Managers are global and local now; adapters and utilties are directly registered with the site manager. Now global and local component registration and lookup behaves very similar.

  + Local registrations can now only have two states: active and inactive. This simplified the code so much, that zope.app.utility, zope.app.registration and zope.app.site were all merged into zope.app.component.

  + Implemented menus as utilities. The API also supports sub-menus now.

  + Implemented views as adapters. Skins and layers are now simply interfaces that the request provides.

• Added an integer-id facility for assigning integer identifiers to objects.
• Added basic catalog and index frameworks.
• Added "sources", which are like vocabularies except that they support very large collections of values that must be searched, rather than browsed.
• Created a new granting UI that allows advanced searching of principal sources.
• Implemented a generic user preferences systsem that was designed to be easily used in TALES expressions and via Python code. Preferences can be edited via http://localhost:8080/++preferences++/. A demo of the preferences can be found at:

        http://svn.zope.org/Zope3/trunk/src/zope/app/demo/skinpref/
  

• ZCML now supports conditional directives using the zcml:condition attribute. The condition is of the form "verb argument". Two verbs, have feature and installed module are currently implemented. Features can be declared via the meta:provides directive.
• Improved API doctool: Code Browser now shows interfaces, text files and ZCML files; the new Book Module compiles all available doctext files into an organized book; the new Type Module lets you browser all interface types and discover interfaces that provide types; views are shown in the interface details screen; views and adapters are categorized into specific, extended and generic; user preferences allow you to customize certain views; 3rd party modules can now be added to the Code Browser.
• Improved I18n-based number and datetime formatting by integrating pytz for timezone support, implementing all missing format characters, and reinterpreting the ICU documentation to correctly parse patterns.
• Added ++debug++ traversal adapter that allows you to turn on debugging flags in request.debug. Currently the following flags are defined: source, tal, errors.
• Improved logout support.
• Added the HTTP request recorder, which lets you inspect raw HTTP requests and responses. It can be used to create functional doctests without requiring third-party tools such as TCPWatch.
• Developed a generic browser:form directive. It is pretty much the same as the browser:editform directive, except that the data is not stored on some context or adapted context but sent as a dictionary to special method (by default).

For a complete list of changes see the CHANGES.txt file.

Resources

• Zope 3 Development Web Site
• Zope 3 Dev Mailing List
• Zope 3 Users Mailing List
• IRC Channel: #zope3-dev at irc.freenode.net

Acknowledgments

Thanks goes to everyone that contributed.

Jim Fulton, Fred Drake, Philipp von Weitershausen, Stephan Richter, Gustavo Niemeyer, Daniel Nouri, Volker Bachschneider, Roger Ineichen, Shane Hathaway, Bjorn Tillenius, Garrett Smith, Marius Gedminas, Stuart Bishop, Dominik Huber, Dmitry Vasiliev, Gary Poster, Julien Anguenot