July 2000 - Zope-Announce

ANNOUNCE: Going Virtual Interbase Adapter v0.1
by Jeff K. Hoffman 11 Jul '00

11 Jul '00

Going Virtual, LLC is proud to announce the first release of its Zope Database Adapter for Interbase v6.0 beta. The only known limitations are those imposed by Interbase when using Dynamic SQL, and our limited support for ARRAYs. The adapter has been tested on Linux and Solaris, using both Zope 2.1.6 and 2.2 beta. While this is the first release, it is feature complete and awaits only community testing before the 1.0 release. Please see: http://www.zope.org/Members/RETierney/gvibDA Enjoy! --Jeff --- Jeff K. Hoffman 704.849.0731 x108 Chief Technology Officer mailto:jeff.hoffman@goingv.com Going Virtual, L.L.C. http://www.goingv.com/

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Python 2.0 Unicode support
by Toby Dickenson 11 Jul '00

11 Jul '00

Announcing version 0.3 of the patches to add Unicode support to Zope. http://www.zope.org/Members/htrd/wstring This version uses the built-in unicode support new to Python 2.0 to provide Unicode strings in ZPublisher, property pages, and property sheets, and DTML. Any feedback gratefully accepted. Toby Dickenson

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ANNOUNCE: Zope 2.2.0 beta 4 released
by Brian Lloyd 10 Jul '00

10 Jul '00

Hi all, Zope 2.2.0 beta 4 has been released - you can download it from Zope.org: http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.2.0b4/ This release includes fixes for a number of bugs found in the beta cycle, including a fix for the recent database packing issue. It also contains updated online help and API documentation. I expect this to be the last beta before 2.2 final. For more information, see the CHANGES.txt file for the release: http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.2.0b4/CHANGES.txt If you are still using a 2.1.x version of Zope, be sure to see the document upgrading to Zope 2.2: http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.2.0b4/upgrading_to_220 for information on the recent changes to the Zope security model and other upgrade information. Brian Lloyd brian(a)digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com

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Re: ZStylesheets
by Adrian Hungate 09 Jul '00

09 Jul '00

I have just posted an update to the ZStyleSheets product that fixes the problem with Opera (I hope...) and also a bug that prevented importing of stylesheets with multi-line comments. I have now tested this with much more complex static stylesheets with multiple multi-line comments etc and it seems to work. I have added a new hidden method of ZStyleSheet and ZSSRule called 'dump' which outputs the whole sheet ignoring browser type, but preceding each element with the browsers list. It'll allow you to check why a particular element is not getting sent to a particular browser type. There is also a new visible management tab - Change Browser. This allows you to change the browser settings for the entire sheet, or rule, including its children... http://www.zope.org/Members/haqa/ZStyleSheet Enjoy Adrian... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexander Limi" <alexander(a)limi.net> To: <adrian(a)haqa.clara.net> Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2000 6:24 PM Subject: ZStylesheets > Hi Adrian, > > Love your product. Exactly what I was looking for. > > But I have a few small problems: > > - The browser called Opera (http://www.opera.com) doesn't get the style > sheets no matter what I select in the browser selection list. This is a > pity, as it is at the moment THE most CSS-compliant browser in the world > (version 4 beta 4). Download it, and have a look - it's only 1.5MB in size, > and a fantastic browser. > > We have a lot of users using Opera, so if you could fix ZStylesheets so > Opera gets them too, I will be most pleased. The best would be if Opera was > added to the list as its own entry. > > - When I try to import a style sheet, I get the following error: > > Error Type: Bad Request > Error Value: The id /* contains characters illegal in URLs. > > Traceback (innermost last): > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\ZPublisher\Publish.py, line 224, in > publish_module > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\ZPublisher\Publish.py, line 189, in > publish > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\Zope\__init__.py, line 221, in > zpublisher_exception_hook > (Object: ElementWithAttributes) > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\ZPublisher\Publish.py, line 175, in > publish > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\ZPublisher\mapply.py, line 160, in mapply > (Object: manage_importCSS) > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\ZPublisher\Publish.py, line 112, in > call_object > (Object: manage_importCSS) > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\Products\ZStyleSheet\ZStyleSheet.py, line > 256, in manage_importCSS > (Object: ElementWithAttributes) > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\Products\ZStyleSheet\ZStyleSheet.py, line > 281, in _WalkCSS > (Object: ElementWithAttributes) > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\Products\ZStyleSheet\ZStyleSheet.py, line > 117, in _create > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\OFS\ObjectManager.py, line 240, in > _setObject > (Object: ElementWithAttributes) > File D:\Programs\Zope\lib\python\OFS\ObjectManager.py, line 210, in > _checkId > (Object: ElementWithAttributes) > Bad Request: (see above) > > Do you have any idea on what's wrong? is the stylesheet too complex? > > The stylesheet I'm trying to import is included as an attachment. Hope you > don't mind. > > Keep up the good work! > > Greetings from a Norwegian Zopista, > > > Alexander Limi. >

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Report of the International Zope Documentation Summit
by Martijn Faassen 08 Jul '00

08 Jul '00

Report of the International Zope Documentation Summit 2000 The International Zope Documentation Summit 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany, was a great success! After many hours spent with grueling discussions of the various aspects of Zope Documentation, all parties finally managed to reach an important agreement: * The Zope Documentation needs to be improved. All Zope documenters are now fully focused on reaching this one target. The delegates would like to thank the Jolt Cola company, the Penguin Caffeinated Peppermint company and that great Mexican restaurant for their valuable assistance. A small tension arose when the Swiss delegation found that the rest of the world would not agree upon the fact that Zope was just a simple CGI script. They argued that this means we obviously don't live in the same world as they do, so we wouldn't have anything to say to each other. We reached the compromise to postpone this discussion until the next summit to be held in Geneva, where we will talk things over again in their world. At LinuxTag, which happened to be a small sideshow held around our summit, we found that we were surrounded by the competition. On one side, SourceForge. No problem, cool, you'd say. The Python source is on SourceForge, after all. But then we notice the Evil Conspiracy: on our other side is the PHP booth! Which site uses a lot of PHP? SourceForge! We prepared ourselves with cool Zope posters, but it turned out that they were not enough to defend ourselves from such heathens! Early on thursday the battle reached a stalemate situation. We managed to keep hostilities on the show floor moderate afterwards, and the casuality count was limited during the rest of the show. We consider this a great success. It must be mentioned that this was only possible by signing a pact with the numerically superior BSD camp early on, which agreed to leave us alone if we accepted to run FreeBSD on our machine. We are still trying to find out which treasonous organisation was responsible for the extreme heat on the show floor. Back to the summit, another important agreement was to continue to absolutely deny any connection between us and the Open Source Liberation Army. While disagreeing with us may cause the wrath of this organisation to descend on you, we have nothing whatsoever to do with it. We also deny holding any secret Zope Terrorism BOF on sunday. Furthermore, the presence of Richard Stallman at LinuxTag was a pure coincidence. However hard to believe, his singing was entirely for entertainment purposes. We also did not exchange any coded messages with Rasterman. Again, we cannot be held responsible for anyone blowing you up if you disagree with us. We agreed that it was necessary to hold another Zope Summit soon, lest Zope be completely rudderless without our benign and enlightened guidance. Since we have no connection whatsoever with the Open Source Liberation Army, we're sure you'll agree with us without protest.

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Zope Weekly News
by ethan mindlace fremen 07 Jul '00

07 Jul '00

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: <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> 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 <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> 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. <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> 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 :^) <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> 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. <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> 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

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ANNOUNCE ZEO 0.2.1
by Jim Fulton 07 Jul '00

07 Jul '00

A new release of Zope Enterprise Objects (ZEO) is available at http://www.zope.org/Products/ZEO. ZEO turns the Zope object system into a distributed architecture, allowing multiple processors, machines, and networks to act as one website. This release fixes two bugs in release 0.2: - ZEO clients didn't work properly (effectively at all) on Solaris or Windows NT. - An error in the handling of the distributed transaction lock could cause a client to stop writing and eventually hang if two clients tried to commit a transaction at the same time. - Extra (harmless) messages were sent from the server when invalidating objects during a commit. - New protocols (especially 'loadSerial'), used for looking at DTML historical versions, were not implemented. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@digicool.com Python Powered! Technical Director (888) 344-4332 http://www.python.org Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com http://www.zope.org Under US Code Title 47, Sec.227(b)(1)(C), Sec.227(a)(2)(B) This email address may not be added to any commercial mail list with out my permission. Violation of my privacy with advertising or SPAM will result in a suit for a MINIMUM of $500 damages/incident, $1500 for repeats.

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Zope at the European LinuxTag 2000 (29th of June - 2nd of July)
by Maik Roeder 07 Jul '00

07 Jul '00

Zope at the European LinuxTag 2000 (29th of June - 2nd of July) Zope was part of the European LinuxTag 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany. On the four days of the show both commercial companies and the Open Source and Free Software communities came together to show their activity surrounding GNU/Linux to the 17.000 visitors. We had many Zope developers coming from all over Germany, but also from as far away as France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, who helped organizing the conference, man the Zope booth at the Open Source Pavillion, give talks and hold BOF sessions. Besides demonstrating Zope to the visitors of LinuxTag, we had a lot of opportunity to meet fellow European Zope developers, and many fruitful discussions arose. We finally got to meet each other in real life after having known each other a long time on the mailing lists. On the 29th of June, the first European ZopeCon took place with talks and a tutorial track. We counted 20 to 40 people in the talks, and around 12 people in the tutorial track, which was somewhat surprising, given the fact that we had less than four weeks time for preparing the whole event. The ZopeCon talks opened with an introduction to Zope by Thilo Mezger from innominate AG. Then Mechthild Hofmann, a journalist and web designer, talked about her reasons for using Zope. Next came Ryan Hughes from Neuberger & Hughes, who spoke about the soon to be released version 2.0 of Worldpilot. With Worldpilot, you can manage e-mail over an IMAP server, access your addresses, keep track of todo-lists and make use of a calendar. The next talk was given by Robert Segall, who spoke in an amusing way about his experiences of realizing e-commerce sites with Zope, and about his difficulties getting ISPs to host Zope sites. His tip: You should not mention to your ISP that Zope is this cool web application server! Instead, just say it's simple CGI script. A question came what to do about Apache configuration in that case. It's easy: you call the support line of the ISP and ask them to add a small line in the Apache configuration file, because you have some problem with your new account ;-). In Robert's own words: it's easy! Robert hopes he can release the code for his electronic commerce sites as Open Source. Then there was a talk by Jan Haul about realizing projects in a company, followed by Martijn Faassen, who talked about XML and Zope. Zope is moving towards a system where you can treat Zope objects as XML and XML as Zope objects. This combination will have powerful applications for both XML and Zope. The last Zope talk was given by Joachim Werner from Ioveno, who described what role Zope plays in his business model. In the tutorial sessions Stephan Richter from Digital Creations, Martijn Faassen and Joachim Werner from Iuveno held a question and answer session about a wide variety Zope issues. There were also BOF sessions about Zope, Zope and e-commerce and Zope documentation from friday to sunday. These often moved from their true topic into ad-hoc tutorials on Zope. Overall we think Zope at LinuxTag was a great success! As a result, we're now in the process of organizing an EuroZope community with mailinglist and website, partially so we can better prepare for future European Zope gatherings, and partially because we had so much fun getting to know each other.

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ANN: Forthcoming Zope Book
by Amos Latteier 06 Jul '00

06 Jul '00

Hi, We all know that Zope needs better docs. To this end we've added a help system, API docs and a tutorial to Zope 2.2. Now the important work of replacing the aging guides is job number one. Michel Pelletier has been diligently working on a Zope book for O'Reilly for a number of months. I convinced him to take me on as a co-author and turn the book into official Zope documentation. O'Reilly is on board and is currently choosing between two different open content licenses. Find out the full scoop on the Zope Docs Wiki. http://www.zope.org/Wikis/Docs/ZopeBook We're excited about the book and think that it will fill an important hole the current official Zope docs. As soon as a content license is chosen we'll make our rough drafts available. -Amos -- Amos Latteier mailto:amos@digicool.com Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com

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Updated Compilation of Zope Howtos and Tips
by Alexandre Ratti 05 Jul '00

05 Jul '00

Hello, I updated the compilations of Zope Howtos and Tips in PDF format. The new PDF files contain 195 Howtos and 67 Tips. You can download them from here: <http://www.zope.org/Members/AlexR/ZopeDocs/> Secondary download site (where uncompressed PDFs are also available): <http://alexandre.ratti.free.fr/ZopeDocs/> Cheers. Alexandre

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