ZOPE NEWS January 27, 2002

1. DECISION TIME ON NEW ZOPE.ORG

NZO is moving along thanks to the efforts of Guido, Sidnei, Jeff and others but the Zope Community has an important role to play. Should Plone be used? or the CMF? What content should be carried over to NZO and who's going to help out with this?

Guido van Rossum's Latest Update on NZO

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-web/2003-January/002310.html

An Open Letter Advocating the use of Plone for NZO

http://plone.org/Members/zwark/plone-nzo

An open discussion on how to organize a community voting process for the NZO decision

http://plone.org/Members/slinkp/CMF_Wiki.2003-01-25.3013/CommunityDecisionPr ocess

2. CMF 1.4: HELP WANTED

Andy McKay is looking for help with the CMF 1.4 release.

http://cmf.zope.org/projmgmt/project_schedule/roadmap_1_4

The relevent discussions on the CMF list:

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2003-January/thread.html#16893

3. ZOPE 3 SPRINTS

December saw two Zope 3 sprints in Europe. The first, organized by Kit Blake at Infrae, brought together a large group of sprinters for a wonderful week-long session. Much was accomplished, not just in committed code, but in brainstorming and knowledge sharing. Rotterdam was a blast and Kit really did an exceptional job at running the circus.

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/InfraeSprin tathon

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Alpha1Sprin t

4. ZOPE RELEASES

In the last newsletter we discussed Jim's promise to get a Zope 3 alpha1 release out in 2002. Well, in most timezones, Jim met his promise! On Dec 31, Zope 3 officially saw its first light of day. The release had its intended impact: focus was brought to the project and the schedule.

Quietly another release began to make its way out. Zope 2.6.1 beta1 was released, with fixes for some problems in 2.6.0. Another beta was scheduled for December, but that slipped. The second beta is planned for January, though no announcement has been made.

5. PLONE 1.0 RC2, FINAL IN SIGHT

A second release candidate for Plone was released Jan 22. The number of translations is now up to 24! Also, if you want Plone to look different than the Norwegian Blue layout, RC2 has 8 new skins.

http://plone.org/Members/runyaga/news/RC2_released

6. UPCOMING EVENTS

SolutionLinux 2003

The Zope Europe Association has organized a pavilion of Zope companies and organizations for SolutionsLinux 2003, Paris, Feb 4-6. Participants include Ingeniweb, PilotSystems, Logilab, Cocof, Zope and Python Job Mart, University of Savoie, and Zopera. In conjunction with the pavilion, there is a second Zope 3 UI Sprint in Paris during the same week.

http://www.zope-europe.org/sl2003/

Berne Plone Sprint

The week after the Zope pavilion, there is a Plone sprint in Berne, Switzerland (Feb 10-12). Bernhard Bühlmann is organizing it, and he has an impressive list of attendees. And yes, Berne is gorgeous.

http://plone.org/Members/buehlmann/PloneSprintBerne/News_Item.2002-12-06.054 9

DZUG meeting and sprint

Christian Theune, Maik Jablonski, and the other DZUG'ers are planning a DZUG meeting Mar 24-27. Along with the meeting, a sprint is planned. Looks like Tres Seaver from ZC will be there as well.

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/DZUGSprint

7. ZOPE 3 NEWSLETTER NO. 6

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Zope3Newsl etter6

8. DISCUSSION ON IMPROVEMENTS TO ZPT

If you've used Page Templates and the associated TAL functions, you've probably enjoyed the enhanced usefulness and flexibility they offer. Nevertheless, there is always room for improvement. Order of TAL operations(1) has been the topic du jour on the ZPT mailing list(2).

Shane Hathaway introduced his "Mini proposal"(3) to improve TAL by adding two new attributes: tal:repeat-define and tal:repeat-condition. At issue is the fact that due to the order of operations, a tal:define or tal:condition will only be executed once when on the same element as a tal:repeat. Shane's proposal adds two attributes that would be evaluated for each repetition.

Well, what looked like a fairly straight-forward request generated a storm of comments. The reactions ranged from moderate approval (4) (5) to proposals to change the order of operations and not add tags (6) to proposals of a user-defined order (7). With all the talk of changing things, the "leave well enough alone" crowd came out to play (8). At our deadline, the discussion looks to have stalled with no resolution.

1) http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/current/AppendixC.stx#3-16

2) http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zpt

3) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004210.html

4) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004248.html

5) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004249.html

6) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004241.html

7) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004226.html

8) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004244.html

9. ZOPE SOLUTIONS PROVIDERS LIST REACHES 100

As of this weekend, with the addition of TEKK http://tekk.dk/ from Copenhagen Denmark and Uptime Systemlösungen GmbH http://www.uptime.at/ from Vienna Austria, the Zope Solution Providers list now has 100 members.

10. CMF Portlets Reaches 0.5.1

I'm working on the next release of CMFPortlets, v 0.5.1, and the major new feature will be the interactive layout, thanks to OptionChooser 1.0, a DHTML layers switcher and chooser based on the Dynapi library, which I got to know by means of Tim Lynch, member of our community. OptionChooser is written by Dan George.

CMFPortlets 0.5.1 will be released during the next week. An installer for Plone will be delayed until the release of its 1.0 version, due to remaining issues related to the behaviour of SkinnedFolders, which are the primitives for portlets.

ZN: Ausum, can you give a sketch of what CMFPortlets does and what some possible, easy-to-grok applications could be?

AS: Hi George, what a nice opportunity to write stuff.

CMFPortlets was born from the need to offer personalized content to members, in the same way as many "my.something.com" portals, without paying the price of getting through any other processor in the middle. (No XML is needed here.)

The key idea behind was to pack content into renderable container objects -the portlets, which rely on SkinnedFolders- so that they could use Zope's security and cataloguing machinery, while been able to be easily arranged in a presentation page. So, although portlets are indeed objects with a view method, we don't want nor need to watch them individually, but through a single global method, 'page_view', wich is callable from everywhere (from the root, by default).

A portlet needs to be fully renderable before it gets its way to the presentation page, (aka 'workspace'). If the portlet uses CSS, it needs to contain its own styles, so that they don't disturb another portlet's look in the same workspace. (I'm working on a 'plugable' stylesheet concept so that the designer can define a general stylesheet for the site, and still allow portlets to look the way their authors wanted.). As portlets are containers, they can store anything from other portal types to just code, so that, if we store several documents, we'll see them rendered one below another; and if we store one or more methods calling things from different places, we'll see what those methods retrieve, one thing below the previous. A portlet's default view does render and show all what's inside it, but as it needs to provide itslef a graphical container to show off at the workspace, you can apply to it a "portlet_skin". (Typically boxes with a title.)

Adding, renaming, deleting and setting the size properties of workspaces.

Workspaces (or pages) aren't objects by themselves. Instead, 'page_view' is aimed to give you that impression, by rendering the portlets you have selected (which in their turn are a search to the catalog) in the place in page you've also selected, according to a variable living in portal_memberdata. Every time you add, delete, or rename a workspace, or change its size properties or add/delete a portlet, you retrieve and modify that variable, just that. The methods for the task live in 'portlets_garage'.

Applications for portlets

In its origin, portlets were meant just to provide content personalization for large B2C portals. I use it in combination with RDFSummary to display feeds in my local computer (which I used as demo for a few weeks), but in the corporate and intranet market, they can be used to allow an employee to have its own workspaces according to his role within the company. This same level of content discrimination on a personal basis is a must in large institutions like universities and even the government. There might be cases when the portlets selection is up to the end user, and there might be others where a person with the right role creates the workspaces and assigns them to the users. But the most important, from my perspective, is that it can be hooked to a personalization tool ('portal_personalization' maybe) that tracks a user's session and, based on a computer generated profile and his own needs, offers him a unique visit experience, all on the fly.

I'm sorry I can't tell more within the context of this "impromptu". I hope I have covered at least some of your questions. I'll write a detailed how-to that you could quote for the next-to-tomorrow's release of Zope news. :)

11. NEW HOWTO'S

zSSL SSL Server integrated to Zope http://www.zope.org/Members/nakagami/zSSL Upload, Insert and Retrieval of BLOBs http://www.zope.org/Members/murphy/MySQL-BLOBs How-To install Silva_0.9 on OSX http://www.zope.org/Members/rmoser/osx_silva Row level lock with ZMySQLDA on InnoDB causes error http://www.zope.org/Members/murphy/ZMySQLDA-locking Formulator_With_ZPT http://www.zope.org/Members/beno/HowTo/Formulator_With_ZPT Zope and SSL http://www.zope.org/Members/Ioan/ZopeSSL Using Dreamweaver with Zope, over WebDAV http://www.zope.org/Members/ike/dreamweaver/DAV Zope and Python on Mac OS X v. 10.1 and higher http://www.zope.org/Members/jens/docs/zope_osx Tips for multilingual websites, using DTML and Localizer http://www.zope.org/Members/CodeSyntax/DTML_Localizer Using Folders as Pages http://www.zope.org/Members/phill/FoldersAsPages Issue with importing all from MySQLdb http://www.zope.org/Members/murphy/MySQLdb-import Build a simple ZClass (CatalogAware, non-default Catalog, Folderish) http://www.zope.org/Members/kedai/BuildSimpleZClass

12. PRODUCT RELEASES

ZPhotoSlides 0.9 http://www.zope.org/Members/p3b/ZPhotoSlides/ZPhotoSlides-0.9.tar.gz Play Chess http://www.zope.org/Members/blacktav/chess/play_chess-0.0.zexp Silva-0.9.tgz http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/Silva/Silva-0.9.tgz RemoteUserFolder-0.4

http://www.zope.org/Members/djay/RemoteUserFolder/RemoteUserFolder-0.4.zip Zope Discussion Board http://www.zope.org/Members/rfrey74/zboard/ZopeBoard.zip PythonDB.zip http://www.zope.org/Members/rfrey74/pythonDB/PythonDB.zip IssueTrackers general masscontainer http://www.zope.org/Members/peterbe/IssueTrackerProduct/issuetrackers.zexp Unified HTML Document http://www.zope.org/Members/lheber/software/UnifiedHtmlDocument.tar.gz Silva-0.9.0.1 http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/Silva/Silva-0.9.0.1.tgz Gnowsys version 0.2 (development) http://www.zope.org/Members/nagarjuna/GNOWSYS/Gnowsys-0.2.tgz Formulator-1.3.1 http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/Formulator/Formulator-1.3.1.tgz ParsedXML-1.3.1 http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/ParsedXML/ParsedXML-1.3.1.tgz ZWiki-0.14.0 http://www.zope.org/Members/simon/ZWiki/ZWiki-0.14.0.tgz TextIndexNG-1.08 http://www.zope.org/Members/ajung/TextIndexNG/TextIndexNG-1.08.tar.gz VarImage 1.0 (alpha) http://www.zope.org/Members/terry/VarImage/VarImage-1.0a.tgz XMLWidgets-0.8.4 http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/XMLWidgets/XMLWidgets-0.8.4.tgz BlogTopic-0.1a http://www.zope.org/Members/karl/BlogTopic/BlogTopic/BlogTopic-0.1a.tar.gz QuickLinks-0.1.6 http://www.zope.org/Members/peterbe/QuickLinks/QuickLinks-0.1.6.zip

This week's Zope News was brought to you (in a hurry) by: Troy Farrell, Paul Everitt, Bakhtiar A Hamid, Jeffrey Shell, Ausum Studio and George Donnelly.

<--> george donnelly - http://zettai.net/ - "We Love Newbies" :) Zope Hosting - Dynamic Website Design - Search Engine Promotion Yahoo, AIM: zettainet - ICQ: 51907738 - e:george@zettai.net