March 2000 - Zope-Announce

FYI: Zope Weekly News
by Mike Pelletier 23 May '00

23 May '00

G'day, Zope Weekly News is a digest of some of the useful and interesting events which have occurred on the various Zope mailing lists and the Zope.org site. It is published each Wednesday evening. New Products and Announcements * Paul Everitt announces Sybase support in a joint press release. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013946.html http://www.digicool.com/News/Sybase * "Zen" released ZRadius, a product which allows you to authenticate web users via the Radius authentication protocol. http://www.zope.org/Members/Zen/ZRadius * Anthony Pfrunder announces VisualZope 0.1a. From his web page: Basically, the "goal" of VZ is to provide a SIMPLE visual editing system for graphic designers which works cross-browser and takes advantage of the acquisition and role systems within Zope. What follows is a brief description of the components which make up the final VZ system (probably more accurate than previous posts). http://163.182.196.200/zwiki/VisualZope * Jeff Sheldon has started a weblog of his experiences with Zope. Jeff Sheldon is new to Zope, and is not a professional programmer. His weblog is a valuable resource to those also starting out with Zope. http://weblogs.userland.com/zopeNewbies/stories/storyReader$0 Updates * Zope 2.1.0 beta 2 has been released. This release includes fixes for issues found in beta 1, an updated load_site.py script and Martijn Pieters' patches to implement try/except/else and try/finally in DTML. Unless something major comes up, this will be the final beta before 2.1.0 final. http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.0b2/ * "4am" has submitted an update to his PythonMethod product. It allows methods, written in Python, to be created via the Zope web management interface. http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/PythonMethod * "Drew" contributed an update to his Photo product. It generates thumbnail views of images at the user's preferred size. Requires PIL. http://www.zope.org/Members/Drew/Photo * Itamar Shtull-Trauring announced ZCache v0.2. ZCache is a Python Product which allows you to cache expensive methods, taking strain off your server. It also generates 'Last-Modified' headers, aiding browser and proxy caches. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/014115.html http://www.zope.org/Members/itamar/ZCache Zope.org items * "Zen" submitted a tip he picked up from Michel Pelletier. He explains how volatile attributes work, and how to populate them when your object is loaded from the database. Volatile attributes are attributes which do not get written to the database, and are good for data which changes frequently. http://www.zope.org/Members/Zen/tips/VolatileAttributes * "AlexR" submitted a How-To detailing the use of the DTML entity syntax. "DTML entities" are chunks of DTML which look like this: "&dtml-title_or_id;" http://www.zope.org/Members/AlexR/EntitySyntax Notable Discussions * DTML is a HUGE topic this week. Discussions spill across several lists. A very good job is done of identifying DTML's weak points. Many hold that the difficulty in using DTML comes from it's roots as a reporting language-- it isn't supposed to be used for logic. The problem is, there isn't yet an easy replacement for DTML as a programming language. Python Methods are cited as an excellent start on providing a means of moving logic out of DTML. Christopher Petrilli mentions that DC is looking at grooming Python Methods for inclusion in Zope. Others feel that reporting vs. programming is a forced distinction, and that it is awkward to have to use two different solutions. The claim that generating HTML is actually a rather complex task, and the powerful but ugly features of DTML are a necessary evil. DTML is compared to Perl! <gasp!> Otherwise, lots of very useful tips for using DTML are revealed. An excellent read for DTML beginners and wizards alike. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013710.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/1999-November/002088.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/1999-November/002102.html * Darcy Clark alerts the list of Jon Udell's latest article mentioning Zope. Jon's article discusses the ease of using Zope with Windows databases, the pain of using it with Unix databases, cheers ODBC, and jeers lack of a similar magic bullet for Unix. The thread then continues to discuss the relative merits of various free databases and using them with Zope. http://www.byte.com/column/BYT19991104S0001 http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013711.html Also, Karl Fast does an excellent job of summarising the thread, generating more sage comments. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013762.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013812.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013813.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013840.html * Francois-Regis CHALAOUX posed a question about using Zope with virtual hosting. Several useful responses were generated. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013678.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013688.html * Ben Galbraith submitted a comparison of Zope and Cold Fusion and solicited comments. Some of the usual suspects offer theirs. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013730.html * Otto Hammersmith started a thread about Zope and security. In it, he speaks of some of the security pitfalls that unsuspecting Zope users could experience. Brian Lloyd submits some solutions. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013779.html * Paul Everitt wrote in to remind us that there is a zope-dev(a)zope.org list for technical discussions. A brisk discussion developed to debate what constituted a technical discussion. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013796.html * Theodore Patrick launched a lengthy thread with questions about the effect of threading in Zope. A number of folks from Digital Creations provide answers. The discussion moves on with high volume and content to the topics of benchmarking and performance tuning Zope. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013808.html * Farzad Farid revives the uncacheable image thread. Because Acquisition can lead to different URLs being generated for images when viewed from different locations, it makes caching difficult and can generate excessive traffic. Others offer advice to solve this problem. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/014021.html * David Harrison asks zope-dev how to return an image generated on-the-fly by an External Method. Answers found. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/1999-November/002107.html Mike Pelletier

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New Zope/Squishdot-powered site: MyCommuteStinks.com
by Chris Walters 30 Mar '00

30 Mar '00

http://www.mycommutestinks.com MyCommuteStinks.com is a virtual water cooler where you can share your stories, swap information, meet people, and shop for cool things - all related to that topic we all love to hate: commuting! Here you can post short articles, news items, announcements, etc. as well as hold threaded discussions about them. There are others out there who share your feelings. You will find them here. Check it out! Chris Walters walters(a)id.com

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First Commercial Zope Documentation
by Mark Pratt 29 Mar '00

29 Mar '00

hello, beehive is pleased to announce a first: a series of inexpensive commercial Zope tutorials! Our first tutorial is availible today, in German. This tutorial will be availible in English within 2 to 3 weeks. Each tutorial represents at least 3 months work for the author and the technical editor. Because Zope is undergoing rapid development, we doubt any documentation effort (commercial or community) will ever be able to cover, in real time, all new Zope platform features. Recognizing this predicament, beehive includes with its tutorial free updates for 1 year. Our first tutorial is 62 pages. ZClasses is its focus. The German edition is availible now. More info: http://www.beehive.de We anticipate being able to release new Zope tutorials on a monthly basis. Our second tutorial is currently being edited. Others are in the works. Each beehive tutorial costs 25 DM (when you reside outside of Germany). This, at the current exchange rate, is less than $ 12.50. warm regards, mark -------------------------------------------------------------- mark pratt (managing director) mark(a)beehive.de beehive elektronische medien GmbH http://www.beehive.de phone: +49 30 847-82 0 fax: +49 30 847-82 299

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Zope Weekly News
by Mike Pelletier 29 Mar '00

29 Mar '00

G'day, Zope Weekly News is a digest of some of the useful and interesting events which have occurred on the zope-announce mailing list and the Zope.org site. The ZWN is changing days! The next ZWN will be published on Tuesday. Any opinions contained in the Zope Weekly News are those of the chronicler exclusively. Announcements * ZEO will go Open Source ZEO, the commercial Zope scalability option from Digital Creations, will go Open Source. After a trial period in mid-April, it will be available to everyone by mid-May. ZEO (Zope Enterprise Option) turns Zope into a distributed transactional object system, allowing people to add processors, machines, and networks to scale their web applications. More information can be found on the ZEO Product page. http://www.zope.org/Products/ZEO/ * Oracle 8i Setup file, by Chris Petrilli Chris has released his Oracle setup file. This file is used to create the Oracle library. It has been tested internally for a couple of weeks. See Chris's announcement for a caveat. http://www.zope.org/Members/petrilli/Oracle8i * Zope LATEX Math, by Bruno Vernier On his site, Bruno describes how to use LaTeX notation to render mathematical expressions directly from Zope. http://ess.vancouver.bc.ca/zope/math * Users Group - Ohio James Orbin <jorbin33(a)hotmail.com> would like to set up (or would like to participate in) a Zope users group for Ohio. If you are interested, please write James, or see: http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-announce/2000-March/000137.html New Products * Software Product: L10NFolder, by "fog" The author writes, "This is a subclass of the standard folder with some added bonuses. The L10NFolder support localized properties and search paths." http://www.zope.org/Members/fog/l10nfolder Updates * Software Product: XML Document, by Amos Latteier XML Document has been updated to work with Zope 2.1.6. The latest release is 1.0a6. http://www.zope.org/Products/XMLDocument * Software Product: Zope MySQL Database Adapter, by "mordred" "mordred" has released an update to the MySQL Database Adapter, by Michel Pelletier (Portland). This release is 1.1.4, and fixes one bug: - Fixed a bug that caused Zope to fail on selecting aggregate functions such as 'select max(number) from table' * Software Product: ZWiki, by "simon" ZWiki is a Wiki web for Zope. Zope and Wiki are a good combination. Wiki assumes that, in general, users are trustworthy. Zope, with it's security and transaction history, makes it easy to trust users. ZWiki is a sort of anarchic collaborative authoring system. This version, 0.5, streamlines the default pages and UI, and disables the experimental catalog support. This release is intended to be immediately usable out of the box. http://www.zope.org/Members/simon/ZWiki/ Zope.org items * How-To: Changing Base Classes for a ZClass, by "AlexR" When you create a ZClass, you are given an opportunity to chose which classes it will inherit from. Since ZClasses are often used for rapid prototyping, you will not always select the correct classes the first time. It is quite a lot of work to create a new set of classes with the correct bases and to move all the contents into them from the old classes. Armed with this How-To, you will be able to change the base classes of a ZClass in-place! http://www.zope.org/Members/AlexR/ChangingBaseClasses * How-To: Serve PHP/Perl within Zope, by "Mamey" "As you migrate your site to Zope, you may want to embed a previously created PHP or Perl directory tree within Zope. Or perhaps you found a nifty web application that is coded in PHP/Perl and want to serve it within your Zope site." This is a bit more advanced than simply rewriting certain URLs to be served by a different server. This How-To will actually allow you to embed the external content in dynamic Zope pages. http://www.zope.org/Members/Mamey/PHP -- Mike Pelletier.

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Jobs in Zope World
by FR Chalaoux 29 Mar '00

29 Mar '00

http://www.zope-france.org/ the best place to find a job in Zope World

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Users Group - Ohio
by James Orbin 28 Mar '00

28 Mar '00

Hello All: I posted this to the Zope-Admin-Dev list but it probably should have gone here: I would like to set up (or would like to participate in) a Zope users group for Ohio and would like to know if any subscribers from the list live in Ohio would be interested (or if one has formed, let me know). I live in Columbus, but I'm sure we could work something out for the Cincinatti/Cleveland area as well. I would also be interested in info on a national users group as well. Please contact me directly at Jorbin33(a)hotmail.com (unless it involves the national level or user groups in general - then please post to the list as others may be interested). Thanks, Jim Orbin ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

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ZWiki 0.5 "Simple" released
by Simon Michael 27 Mar '00

27 Mar '00

I streamlined the default pages and UI, and disabled the experimental catalog support. This release is intended to be immediately usable out of the box. Importing zwiki.zexp is not required but recommended. http://www.zope.org/Members/simon/ZWiki is a wiki-on-zope product. Send comments and bugreports to me, the lists or zwikiweb (http://www.joyful.com/zwiki) Thanks! -Simon

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past zope@zope.org archives temporarily unavailable
by Ken Manheimer 22 Mar '00

22 Mar '00

As some of you have noticed, the zope(a)zope.org maillist archives have not been tracking new postings as of last thursday, when a mail system glitch trashed the list and the archives. We got the list back immediately, but the archives have yet to be resurrected. I'm hoping to get them back online tonight. (Unexpected exceptions tripped up the last attempt, and the rebuild needs to be done in the off-hours because it locks the list in the meanwhile, and the meanwhile is long...) Ken Manheimer klm(a)digicool.com

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Zope Weekly News
by Mike Pelletier 22 Mar '00

22 Mar '00

G'day, Zope Weekly News is a digest of some of the useful and interesting events which have occurred on the various Zope mailing lists and the Zope.org site. It is published each Wednesday before Noon. Any opinions contained in the Zope Weekly News are those of the chronicler exclusively. Announcements * Two new Zope revisions were released this week. 2.1.5 filled in security holes which affected sites which allow untrusted users to create DTML documents. Ironically, a bug-fix which was included in 2.1.5 broke code which depended on the bug. This was fixed in the second release, 2.1.6. http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.5/Zope_215_release http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.6/Zope_216_release * Thanks to Eduardo Fernandez Corrales, the Zope Weekly News is now available in Spanish! He is publishing translations at Zope Hispano, a portal for Spanish-speaking Zope developers and users. http://zope.sistelnet.es * Healtheon | WebMD is hiring in Atlanta, GA Healtheon | WebMD is looking for Software Engineers with experience in Python and/or Zope to work in our Global News Center located in Midtown Atlanta, GA. You must be willing to relocate. http://www.zope.org/Members/kbirch-webmd/hiring-notice New Products * The Portal Toolkit has been packaged into a snapshot release for use by those who do not have access to CVS. The PTK is targeted at community-oriented portals, but is also appropriate for any site which wants to give members a personalised view of content. The snapshot release is 0.7.1. http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK Updates * Software Product: load_site.py with additional features, by Itamar Shtull-Trauring Itamar has updated his powered-up 'load_site.py' again. The present release is 1.3.1. This update adds a GUI, built with wxPython. 'load_site' is a utility for dumping content from a file system into the ZODB. http://www.zope.org/Members/itamar/load_site * Software Product: ZopeEDIT, by "jimbag" The latest release of this product, 0.0.5, adds limited RPC support which is used to create and delete folders. ZopeEDIT is a tool which enables any text editor to edit content on a live Zope server. It does not need to run on the same machine as the Zope server. http://www.zope.org/Members/jimbag/ZopeEDIT/ * Software Product: LocalFS, by Jonothan Farr Version 0.1.6, the Ides of March release, fixes several bugs, is more robust about determining file types, and creates XMLDocuments and StructuredDocuments automatically, where appropriate. LocalFS is a product which allows Zope to serve files out of a local filesystem. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-announce/2000-March/000130.html * Software Product: SiteAccess, by Evan Simpson Evan has release version 1.0.1 of SiteAccess. This version fixes a bug which interfered with FTP access to Zope. The SiteAccess product allows Zope to serve different content depending on the hostname the site was accessed by. http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/SiteAccess Zope.org items * How-To: VersionFTPServer, by "htrd" This How-To describes modifications to Zope which allow you to work within a Version through FTP. Versions allow you to stage changes to a Zope site by effectively forking the database. Changes that you make in a Version are not publicly visible until you ask them to be. http://www.zope.org/Members/htrd/howto/VersionFTPServer * How-To: How To: Use GenericUserFolder with an SQL database Version 1.1, by "hippy" This How-To shows how to customise GenericUserFolder(GUF) to use an SQL database as its repository for usernames, passwords, roles and anything else you want to store about a user. The update adds information from Dennis Baker to help get things going with MySQL. http://www.zope.org/Members/hippy/GUF_SQL_crypt_1_1 -- Mike Pelletier.

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March 2000 growth of Zope on Internet
by jlim＠natsoft.com.my 21 Mar '00

21 Mar '00

Hello, The latest figures for Web servers using Frontier and Zope on the Internet are out. Zope continues its phenomenal growth. Apache is also growing furiously also. Dates: Feb 1 to Mar 1 Zope: 26% from 305 to 385 servers Frontier: 13% from 175 to 198 Apache: 21% from 6.48m to 7.87m IIS: 12% from 2.44m to 2.74m Visit http://webfeet.editthispage.com/frontier for detailed charts. PS: These figures do not include copies of Zope/Frontier used as Content Servers running behind other Web servers. Data from Netcraft surveys. --- "Stressed spelled backwards is desserts." jlim(a)natsoft.com.my NATSOFT MALAYSIA (60)3-706 1216 Visit my web site for Asian and local e-biz news http://webfeet.editthispage.com/

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