[Zope-Annce] Zope Weekly News
ethan mindlace fremen
mindlace@digicool.com
Fri, 07 Jul 2000 18:10:43 -0400
The Open Source Conference, help system almost complete,
Tutorial fixes, a new Development area on Zope.org,
basic authorization working in Zope Studio, a roadmap
for Zope.org, and more!
The opinions expressed in Zope Weekly news are solely the authors',
and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope Community
at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition.
You can always get to the most recent Zope Weekly News
with "one convenient URL",
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/current
The next week of zope weekly news will not be happening,
in order to allow the ZWN to get back on a Tuesday schedule.
And Now For Something Completely Different:
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Coming Events
The Open Source Convention
This "enormous convention",
http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon2000/
hosted by O'reilly, is shaping up to be pretty
interesting. Aside from the State of Python,
given by Guido von Rossum, there's also going
to be a "talk on the CERT Advisory",
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/w/evening_events.html
about cross-site scripting, a web-wide security
issue that the Zope Community was among the first
to begin implementing security policies for: they'll
land with zope 2.2.
Zope is going to be at the conference in force,
with:
- Paul "opening eyes to the Zope-Mozilla initiative",
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e_sess/853
- Ryan telling the world "you can have web
IMAP and collaboration",
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e_sess/725
- Christopher, as always, concentrating
on the "edification of the community",
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/w/python_tutorials.html
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Documentation
-- by Michel Pelletier
The 2.2 Help system is just about complete and Amos and Michel are
wrapping up the final details for the 2.2 final release. The
Online Help system has improved, more complete API docs have been
added, and the Tutorial has been polished up and bugs fixed.
Training
The Zope Training material is complete and very comprehensive.
Michel conducted a moments notice training last week and Amos
will be conducting one more training in July.
Online Help
The massive task of proofing and checking help content for all
Zope management pages is done! Every managment screen in Zope has
a help button that links to a context sensitive help screen
describing how to use that screen.
New content content for the History and Ownership managment
screens has been added, making these cool new 2.2 features easier
to use.
Tutorial
The Zope tutorial is complete and the recent bugs that prevented
it from working with beta 2 have been fixed.
API Docs
The API Docs project is complete! We have hit our milestone
goal of having all stock addable Zope objects documented in the
API documentation section of the online help system. In
addition to the stock objects, we have also documented a number
of common Zope objects that are used frequently by DTML
programmers. For the 2.2 final release we have 20 API
documented:
AuthenticatedUser, DTMLDocument, DTMLMethod, DateTime,
ExternalMethod, File, Folder, Image, MailHost, ObjectManager,
ObjectManagerItem, PropertyManager, PropertySheet,
PropertySheets, Request, Response, Vocabulary, ZCatalog,
ZSQLMethod and Record.
Book
The book table of contents is now online "in the docs Wiki",
http://www.zope.org/Wikis/Docs/TableOfContents.
The current table of contents is a good compromise of beginner
and advanced oriented material. While the consideration of
future guides is outside the scope of this project, it should be
noted that introductory material is favored in the book more
than developer material and that in the future we may address
this issue with some form of Developer's Guide. We feel however
that teaching the beginner masses how to use Zope is much more
important than teaching a much smaller audience how to develop
with it.
O'Reilly is still working on determining an open content license
which we are trying to resolve ASAP so that we can release our
rough drafts to the community.
The book will be authored in Structured Text and the new
features of Structured Text Next Generation (STXNG) will be used
to convert the book to DocBook.
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Zope Status
-- by Brian Lloyd
Summary
A short week this week due to the US holiday, but a surprising
amount still managed to get done. Many beta bugs were stamped
out, and some progress (though admittedly not very *visible*
progress) was made on preparations for the Zope developer
site.
Last week highlights
17 collector issues were knocked out last week. Kudos to Dr. Peer
Griebel, Adam Karpierz, Toby Dickenson, BitDancer and others who
posted patches. In other news, Jim Fulton noticed a problem with
the ZODB packing algorithm that could cause problems if you pack
to a particular time and then try to subsequently pack to an
earlier time. Coincidentally, Ethan noticed it the next day when
it bit him on Zope.org :^} Jim has checked in a fix for 2.2.
Last week I also incorporated some feedback on the guide to Zope
"security changes for product authors",
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/How-To/ProductAuthorUpdateGuide/index_html
Amos and the Portland crew revised the online help content and
API documentation as well as well as taking care of a javascript
problem in the new tutorial.
Next week
The *original* plan was to get 2.2 final out this week, but I have
tweaked the plan a little. In working through the reported beta
issues last week there were a few that I thought people would have
run into already by now, which makes me think that we should try
for a little wider coverage with one more beta release. Look for
a beta 4 release Thursday or Friday.
Related to that, one of the problems I think we're seeing is that
some folks can't use the beta because certain products they use are
not 2.2 ready yet. The product authors (understandably) are not
necessarily working feverishly to be 2.2 ready because 2.2 is still
in beta :^) To break this impasse, we'll probably give beta 4 a week
or so to scare up any last-minute issues and then proceed with a
2.2 final. I'm quite sure that we'll find more issues as people
migrate sites and products to 2.2. I think it would be better
to finalize 2.2 and resolve issues that pop up in a 2.2.1 relatively
soon after than to have the 2.2 beta period drag on any longer.
Finally, as alluded to above, there has been some progress in working
out some needed infrastructure for the "developer home" area on
Zope.org. I want to get the basic area stubbed out and the description
of what the open development process will look like posted this week
so that we will have *visible* progress :^)
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Zope Studio
-- by Martijn Pieters
Last week
- Basic Authentication in Mozilla is fixed again, and the latest
snapshots
allow you to log into a Zope server once more.
- A new step has been added to the ZopeStudioInstallation
instructions, to
make sure that Mozilla correctly registers the Zope Studio skin. The
snapshot (which doesn't need updating) will still have bugs, due to
changes in the Mozilla core. Thanks to zig for the issue report.
- A visit to LinuxTag and the 4th of July cut my week short, but some
updates were made to the ZWiki pages.
This week
- More work on the ZWiki pages, more documentation.
- Set up a plan for requirements gathering.
- Maybe some fixes to the current Zope Studio code, but only if people
supply me with patches. =)
Zope Studio Tracker stats
- 1 new issue, fixed the same day. Thanks zig.
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Zope Web
-- by Ethan Fremen
Bug Fixes
o A member that did not exist had to be deleted
because the fact that he had no roles messed things
up.
o You can now send feedback to Paul Everett
because the acl_users folder in his Member
folder has been deleted :)
o Ethan is now located in Fredericksburg, VA
instead of Fort Collins, CO.
Roadmap
There's been some extensive cogitation on the
roadmap for the zope web:
1. Platform issues: These will come first,
because everything else depends upon them.
This includes:
o Updating to Zope 2.2 final upon its release.
This has the stellar merit of making wikis
searchable.
o Transitioning to ZEO. This is also luminous
in that it means we can do lots of diagnostics,
updating, and other tasks without taking down
zope.org. It will also make scalability easy,
though our current PIII-500 is handling the load
fine.
o Fixing Catalog issues. Right now searches
for things like dtml-in fail. This needs
to change.
o Topics. The addition of topics that allow
filtering either by meta-data or body content
will allow the presentation of how-to's,
Products, and other types of content
to be presented in an easy to follow manner.
2. The User Focus. Zope.org will add three
new subdomains:
o dev.zope.org will be for zope core hackers
and python product makers
o do.zope.org will be for site builders,
including content managers and DTML
coders
o biz.zope.org will be for the commerce
side of zope
3. Moving to the PTK. This stage will follow
close on the heel of the User Focusing,
where we integrate the PTK (back) into zope.org
in order to gain benefits like discussability,
wizards, skins & enhanced workflow.
4. Feature Fest. At this point, Zope.org should
be on solid ground, and we can start bringing
in more features, like email/list integration,
product dependancy checking, and more.
Statistics
o June was a good month for Zope.org, with a record
2.9 million hits, but slightly fewer visits
than last month ( 175k instead of 178k )
indicating a ever-more devoted but not
necessarily expanding pool.
o The Zope lists had lots of churn, with only 4
net new subscribers.
o It takes 208.725 gallons or 790.1076 litres
of 86-87 octane gasoline to travel the
1733.9 miles from Fort Collins, CO
to Fredericksburg, VA in a moving truck.
--
ethan mindlace fremen
Zopatista Community Liason