[zope-news] Locale Support and basic Online Help for Zope 3

[Stephan Richter]

Locale Support

Over Christmas I finished the implementation of the Locale Support Proposal:
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/Zope3/I18nFormatLocaleSupport

While it was overshadowed by some license problems (that are now resolved) and 
some grief with time.strptime() on Windows, the zope.i18n.locales is a 
powerful package to localize everything around number and datetime objects. 
Since I utilized the ICU project's XML-based locale information, we have now 
full support of all locales that ICU supports!

At the heart of the locale support lies the zope.i18n.format module, which can 
be used independently of the locales package. It can read number and 
date/time format patterns. It then uses these binary patterns to parse for 
example date/time strings into datetime objects or convert datetime objects 
to strings.

All of the code is accompanied by over 450 tests. Some of the ToDo-items 
include documentation, integration into ZPT and the Translation Service, and 
maybe restructuring the Translation Service to use Locales instead of Message 
Catalogs.


Online Help

I also implemented
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/Zope3/OnlineHelp

The Online Help is supposed to be incredibly similar to Zope 2's Help. Since 
currently we do not have STX or ReST implmented in Zope 3, I was able to 
implement the proposal only for plain text files. You can access the Online 
help from everywhere adding ++help++ to the URL, like in 
http://localhost:8080/++help++

Furthermore, if you want to see the OnlineHelp in action, you should create a 
File and click on Upload; look at the right column of the screen and you will 
see an 'online help' box.

We urgently need people to write documentation for the onlinehelp, documenting 
the various screens and functionality!

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training