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November 16th Zope Weekly News
by emf 17 Nov '00

17 Nov '00

2.2.3 on its way, tips on how to use the Zope Book, PTK 0.9.2 released with lots of bug fixes, Documentation Process feedback requested, and the whys and wherefores of Zope.org. 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. If you or your company are doing something cool with zope, "submit it to the Zope Weekly News", mailto:zope-web@zope.org for possible inclusion. And Now For Something Completely Different: --- Zope Status by Brian Lloyd Summary Tying up the 2.2.3 release Recent News (Reprint from last week but worth repeating - we really want feedback on this!) Documentation is currently a weak area for Zope. Ironically, the problem really isn't a lack of content, its a lack of organization among those who produce useful documentation. The current documentation "process" is not well-defined, so Amos and Michel have started a Fishbowl project to develop and formalize the process of producing Zope documentation. The end result of this will be a well-known and discoverable process that will allow the community to take better advantage of the "documentation energy out there", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DocumentationProcess/FrontPage Adam Davis' proposal for several "quick fixes" that we could make to the Zope management interface to improve productivity in the 2.3 release timeframe has become an "active project", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ManagementInterfaceQuickFix Toby Dickenson has started a Python 2.0 Migration proposal - the idea is to identify all of the issues involved in using Zope with 2.0 and what we still need to do to make Python 2 "officially supported", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/Python20Migration Near Future The evil "__call__" bug is now officially stamped out (thanks to those of you in the community who tested the fix!), which was the last bullet left before making the Zope 2.2.3 release. I expect this to be out on Friday (Nov 16). --- Documentation by Michel Pelletier All's quiet on the "book":http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/ front. We're still getting good comments; special mention goes to Lee Hunter who sent us great editorial comments on Chapter 8. We've gotten a lot of comments along the lines of: 1. I can't find out how to make a Python Method, and 2. I downloaded Python Methods from Zope.org but they don't work. The answer to the first question is: Python Methods do not come with Zope 2.2 (but they will come with 2.3), you need to get them and install them. Normally you would get them from Zope.org, but the answer to question two is: The version of Python Methods on Zope.org is old, and it will not work with the book examples. You need to check Python Methods out of CVS in order to get the examples to work. You can do this by following the "instructions":http://www.zope.org/Resources/CVS_info and getting the CVS "module for Python Methods":http://cvs.zope.org/Products/DC/PythonMethod/ . Sorry folks, we don't have any control over the release schedules for the software, so hopefully this gets updated soon to make it easier for you to follow the book. This week Amos and I are pushing for the final effort on the new "Documentation Process":http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DocumentationProcess/FrontPage . We need your comments! We've gotten some good ones so far, but we need to make sure this jives with everybody, including the community, and *especially* the geeks at Digital Creations. Check it out. --- State of the PTK by Tres Seaver I have uploaded a tarball for the 0.9.2 release of the PTK; it can be found at: http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK. * ZopePTK-0.9.2-src.tar.gz: Wizard and DemoPortal products are *only* available as export files. Note that *many* changes are available only in the updated DemoPortal product. Please see the "Install notes":/Products/PTK/install. Changes 0.9.2 (2000/11/15) * Removed antique UML from snapshot tarball. * Cleaned up PortalFolder's implementation of the "metatypes" protocol required by ObjectManager (working on copy/paste/import issues). Tracker #'s 116, 130, 131, 133. (Note that some problems still remain, buried in the guts of Zope's paste machinery and acquisition/security interactions). * Restored content migration code (for pre-0.8 content). Tracker #129. * Added "expiration filter" to catalog searching. Tracker #46. * Corrected interface breakage caused by changes to DublinCore implementation. Tracker #'s 109, 114, 115, 119, 122, 126. * Implemented "browser sniff" in the 'css_aware' stylesheet code; NS4 should get styles inline, while less brain-damaged browsers continue to get '<link href="...">' version. Tracker #124. * Added one-pixel, transparent 'spacer.gif' to all interfaces; may fix some "broken pipe" Medusa tracebacks. Tracker #128. 0.9.1 (unreleased) * New "Software Engineering" interface (soon to be the basis for a fishbowl/dogfood site). * Split DublinCore into three interfaces: - DublinCore, for external queries - CataloguableDublinCore (returns dates for better searching) - UpdatableDublinCore Added indexes/metadata to catalog for these fields. * Suppressed non-content (e.g., DTMLMethods) in folder_contents display. * Cleaned up some of PortalFolder's interface warts, and its registration as an addable object. Please direct questions to the Zope-PTK list (zope-ptk(a)zope.org) and submit bug reports (patches would be great!) and feature requests to the PTK tracker (http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/Tracker) --- Zope Web -- by Ethan Fremen What's Up With Zope.org? Yesterday, Zope Newbies "Asked what was up with zope.org", http://weblogs.userland.com/zopeNewbies/2000/11/15 Specifically, they wanted to know why it was so darn slow. The truth is that Zope has outgrown it's home. Zope.org, with its more than 10,000 objects, consumes between "100-150 megabytes of ram", http://www.zope.org/manual/mem.png This is more than an average site would consume: we have a large number of pages that are fairly frequently visited, whereas most sites have a small number of very active pages. That's for the ZEO Client: The storage server consumes another 50mb or so. When spiders hit us, all of our pages try to get loaded into ram, which (as the ZODB has nearly 600mb of "active" objects) leads to zope.org hitting the limit of physical RAM. I put in a robots.txt to block spidering and reduced the cache "recommendation" to 700. The first was a good idea, the second was not, and is the proximal cause of zope.org's slowdown. I have since increased it to 2000, which seems to have helped quite a bit. I am working feverishly this week to move us to our new cluster, which should alleviate the problem. With multiple ZEO Clients running, I intend to make spiders hit one ZEO Client, while keeping the other ZEO Clients open for human use. -EOT-

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GNOME Web Team - Call for Volunteers
by rainlood 17 Nov '00

17 Nov '00

Hello. http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/974368712/ GNOME Web Team - Call for Volunteers Posted by Christian Schaller on Thursday November 16, @04:58AM from the spiderman-wanted dept. Joakim Ziegler has posted a statement to the GNOME announce list calling for volunteers to help out with the GNOME website. Click on the Read More link to see the full statement. GNOME Web Team - Call for Volunteers. Background: The current GNOME project web offering, while having a lot of good content, is highly disorganized, with unclear maintainerships and diverging design, navigation, content generation, and so on. I did a redesign of www.gnome.org this spring, which was fairly successful, but due to time constraints and other factors, there is still a lot of old cruft in the site hierarchy, and some parts of the site are sadly underdeveloped. A recent discussion on gnome-hackers concluded that there should be an organized effort to bring the total GNOME web offering together, and rework it from the bottom up, so we can present a polished, functional and coherent image to the world. Additionally, Shawn Amundson indicated that he wanted to pass responsibility for www.gtk.org to the GNOME web team, as a part of an effort to reduce duplication of content between developer.gnome.org and www.gtk.org, and to further integration between the sites. What's happening now: I offered to volunteer as the organizer of the new web team, since I have quite a lot of experience both with GNOME sites and with web site building in general. We want to gather a team of dedicated people to work on the GNOME web sites. There are a number of issues to be worked out before actual site building/rework starts, including such diverse topics as: What site building technologies to use (WML, PHP, Zope, Perl, Python...) Design goals for the website. Site structure and content. In other words, most topics are open for discussion. We're aiming to resolve most of the high-level issues rather quickly, to be able to move on to actually reworking the sites. Who should join: There are two groups of people that should join. One is the interested web designers/scripters/etc., who want to take an active part in planning, designing and building one of the most important sets of web sites in the free software community. The other group is the people who take an interest in the more high-level issues of presenting GNOME to the world. Where to go: There's a wonderful mailing list just for the purpose of the new web team. http://lists.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-web-list/ If you're at all interested in working on this project, please join.

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A Tutorial / Checklist for making the Zope decision
by kamon ayeva 15 Nov '00

15 Nov '00

Hi, I have just finished a first version of a guide to help us convince corporate decision makers and prospects to choose Zope for their projects. You will find it here: http://www.zope.org/Members/Kemalus/make_zope_decision/index_html I am also looking for stronger arguments for some points, so if you find them before I do, let me know so that I add them. A pdf version will follow. Regards, Kamon Ayeva _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.

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FYI: Digital Creations secures $12M round of investment
by Paul Everitt 14 Nov '00

14 Nov '00

Hello Zope friends. At long last we at Digital Creations are able to publicly say it: we've closed a $12M round of investment: http://www.digicool.com/News/CRound.html It's out on the newswire now. We'll start pushing it out more over the next 24 hours. This, needless to say, is a big deal, one that we've worked on really, really hard this year. With the tech market downturn since March, and with Open Source particularly getting a beating, it's vindicating to get good funding from strong partners. When everyone else was getting wads of cash during the go-go times, we were quietly at work, being frugal, making money, making a business case, and being profitable. We're proud to say that we got our money when money was hard to find. Let's put it this way: Open Source business is hardly dead. It's just different, and better. What will this mean? First and foremost, Zope and Digital Creations will become very competitive, very quickly, along a number of axes. As the PythonLabs move indicated, we are taking aggressive steps to become a dramatic force in the worlds of content management, web application services, and Open Source leadership. With this round, our business model has been validated. As a member of the Zope community, I view this as "the dream delivered". Many of us care deeply about this thing we're involved in, and sometimes it feels like a longshot. Though this is still a David vs. Goliath, David now has a slingshot, and a bit of steel in his eye. Thanks go to the folks here at DC, to the Zope and Python communities, and to the companies around the world that are basing their business on Zope. Onward! --Paul

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Learning Zope - A Developer's Guide to Zope
by Itamar Shtull-Trauring 09 Nov '00

09 Nov '00

I've written a guide, starting from the basics and leading up to the most complex, for aspiring Zope developers. It's organized by level and by subject, with links to lots of relevant links for each subject. If you've spent time searching zope.org for that Howto you know exists, if you're just starting and want a roadmap, or if you're looking to expand your knowledge, there's something here for you. http://www.zope.org/Members/itamar/LearningZope/LearningZope.html http://www.zope.org/Members/itamar/LearningZope/LearningZope.pdf -- Itamar S.T. itamar(a)zoteca.com

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November 8th Zope Weekly News
by emf 08 Nov '00

08 Nov '00

Structured Documents, Wikis for Now, Documentation process, more Write Locking, HiperDOM, Quick Management fixes, *Zope: The Definitive Guide*, count the Zopatistas, and clustering Zope.org 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. If you or your company are doing something cool with zope, "submit it to the Zope Weekly News", mailto:zope-web@zope.org for possible inclusion. And Now For Something Completely Different: --- Zope Status by Brian Lloyd Summary Getting ready for 2.2.3 Recent News Last week saw a number of new proposals in the Fishbowl at dev.zope.org. Fred Drake, a newly acquired member of the DC team added a proposal for Structured Documents that can interoperate with a wide range of tools and render themselves in a "variety of formats", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/StructuredDocument Ken Manheimer started the "Wiki for now", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/WikiForNow proposal, aimed at resolving some of the immediate shortcomings of the current Wiki product regarding its use for dev.zope.org. The idea here is to spend a short amount of time fixing the most painful problems that impede progress in the Fishbowl. Documentation is currently a weak area for Zope. Ironically, the problem really isn't a lack of content, its a lack of organization among those who produce useful documentation. The current documentation "process" is not well-defined, so Amos and Michel have started a Fishbowl project to develop and formalize the process of producing Zope documentation. The end result of this will be a well-known and "discoverable process", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DocumentationProcess/FrontPage that will allow the community to take better advantage of the documentation energy out there: Jeffrey Shell continues to make progress on analysis on the "Write Locking project", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/WriteLocking/FrontPage to support DAV-aware Web tools that require DAV locking support on the server: HiperLogica and Martijn Pieters are working on fleshing out the HiperDom project and moving various bits of HiperDom info into the Fishbowl. Zopistas interested in this project to add XMLC-like templating to Zope should visit the new HiperDom development home and get their "licks in now", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/HiperDom/FrontPage while the requirements are being formalized. Also, Adam Davis has sent a final request for comment on his proposal for several "quick fixes", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/ManagementInterfaceQuickFix that we could make to the Zope management interface to improve productivity in the 2.3 release timeframe. Near Future I had hoped to get 2.2.3 out this week, but there are still a few loose ends to tie up. I hope to (finally) get the fix for the infamous "__call__" bug included among other things. We have started some work behind the scenes to apply better organization to dev.zope.org to make it easier to find what you are looking for and to get "at a glance" status for various projects and proposals. Some of this will be bound up with the "Wiki for now" project, but there will be at least some organizational progress before that project is finished. --- Documentation by Michel Pelletier Amos and I spend much of last week *not* working on the book (yeah, we couldn't believe it either). Although we did handle the usual dozen or so comments, suggestions, and revisions sent to us by you wonderful community people about the book, most of our time was spent writing up a proposal and prototype for the Brand Spankin' New Digital Creations Documentation Process. What is that, you ask? As it stands Digital Creations has no process for authoring, editing, delivering, or maintaining, documentation. This, obviously, creates lots of problems. How many resources to we throw at documentation? How is it done? Who edits it, and when? Where can it be found? Who is it intended for? Over the past year, Amos and I have worked up a specific *instance* of a documentation process for developing a Zope book. After some consideration, and meta-thought, we have put together a proposal and prototype documentation process. For the OO-illuminati among you, you can think of this as a *class* that defines a generic process which will be used in certain instances to create documentation artifacts (for example, we used it to create the *Zope Book*). But obviously Amos and I have experience writing only one artifact, so we need your help to make this process a real thing that will really help. So "check it out", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DocumentationProcess/FrontPage over at "dev.zope.org", http://dev.zope.org/ and tell us what you think. Many thanks, and on that note, what ZWN would be complete without me plugging "the Zope Book":http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/ at least once? But I do have some real news, it looks like O'Reilly has decided that the book title will be *Zope: The Definitive Guide*, which is a bit of a misnomer because it *isn't* definitive, it's didactic. But the marketroids hath spoke, and so it shall be. Till next week. --- Zope Web -- by Ethan Fremen How Many Zopatistas? Zope gets downloaded from zope.org 12-15,000 times a month. It has risen steadily over the last year and a half. Zope has been downloaded roughly 200,000 times since version 2.0. Zope is distributed on all major linux distributions, but there's no way of tracking those. Netcraft asserts that there are 937 servers "reporting themselves as zope", http://www.netcraft.com/survey/Reports/0010/byserver/Zope/index.html Note that this only works for proxy-passed or naked zopes, not pc/fast-cgi'd sites. For example, CodeIt shows up as Apache. Another reason to encourage the practice of proxy-passing :) I think it may be safe to assume that at most, 1/2 of live zope sites use proxy passing. There are 1617 members of zope(a)zope.org and 409 members of zope-dev. There are 200,000 unique visits to zope.org every month (ok, that's a record :). Therefore, I believe there are at least 2000 zope sites and 10,000 - 20,000 people who have used zope at least once, though they may not admit it if they're running for election. Zope Heads East for Winter Zope is finally going to be moving to a three-system cluster! When you've got a completely dynamic website with over 10,000 pages of content, 256mb ram just doesn't cut it any more. We've got a nice system up with the folks at baymountain.com, which includes one Storage Server and two ZEO Client servers, in the addition to a load balancer. This way, no spider should get in our way, and as our usage grows, we'll just be able to add more commodity boxen as ZEO clients to handle the load! You can go visit our tenuous "migration plan", http://www.zope.org/Wikis/zope-web/MigrationPlan as long as you promise to remember that the best laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley. Vote! Here's something for all you international folks who're sick and tired of United States elections, and something more important for those of you who've made the choice between Gush or Bore: Renaming Python Methods. Python Methods have a poor name, because you can have a python method that lives on the filesystem. Furthermore, we're going to have Perl methods soon, and maybe tcl methods and java methods and Assembly methods... ok, probably not assembly methods. Anyway, take the poll, and help decide what- if anything- methodish objects in zope should be called. Documentation Overview Rik Hoekstra has submitted a rough draft of the Documentation Overview: Take a "look at it", http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ORganization/Use and "send in your comments", zope-web(a)zope.org -EOT-

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Vote on the new name for Python Methods!
by Shane Hathaway 07 Nov '00

07 Nov '00

Being Election Day in the United States, now is a good time to vote on the new name for Python Methods. Python Methods are a relatively new concept for Zope. They give you the features of DTML, such as through-the-web editing and security, while providing a familiar, refined syntax. But before we can fold them into the Zope core, you need to help us choose the right name for them. Some have voiced the opinion that the name "Python Method" is confusing because it can just as easily refer to methods in standard Python modules. There are some interesting alternatives, so please cast your vote! http://www.zope.org/Members/hathawsh/poll

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RFC: Zope.asn.au : Australian Zope User Group Association
by Nicholas Roberts 06 Nov '00

06 Nov '00

pls send this version to the Announce list, thanks ---- RFC: Zope.asn.au : Australian Zope User Group Association hi Australian Zopistas, I am interested in forming an Australian Zope User Group Association. i.e. Zope.asn.au. Could those individual and organisational users of Zope let me know if they are keen. I really think its a good idea to push this now, I know of a few players (1 in Qld, 2 in Vic), but compared to the mainstream Zope is miniscule. Some things I would like to see Zope.asn.au do would be 1. Link-up with the Python crowd, in the Universities and Industry. Some Python outfits are doing industrial strength business (ie CommSecure) 2. Encourage schools & uni's to teach, talk about Zope (many Academics are already Python users) 3. Advocate Zope in the IT Marketplace 4. Organise an Australian Zope conference, maybe the culmination of a 6-12 month campaign 5. Get Zope into the Australian IT media 6. Create a Job Board or some kind of Australian Zope vortal 7. Set-up a Zope.asn.au mailing list 8. Work-out a way to get more resources into Zope in Australia 9. Showcase some Australian Zope (initially Python ?) Zope success stories please email your initial response to mailto:Zope@synarchy.net -- Nicholas Roberts, Webmaster/Director mailto:Nicholas.Roberts@SYNARCHY.NET -- Websystems Information Australia ABN: 95 052 408 849 http://websystems.com.au

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RFC: Zope.asn.au : Australian Zope User Group Association
by Nicholas Roberts 06 Nov '00

06 Nov '00

RFC: Zope.asn.au : Australian Zope User Group Association hi Australian Zopistas, I am interested in forming an Australian Zope User Group Association. i.e. Zope.asn.au. Could those individual and organisational users of Zope let me know if they are keen. I really think its a good idea to push this now, I know of a few players (1 in Qld, 2 in Vic), but compared to the mainstream Zope is miniscule. Some things I would like to see Zope.asn.au do would be 1. Link-up with the Python crowd, in the Universities and Industry. Some Python outfits are doing industrial strength business (ie CommSecure) 2. Encourage schools & uni's to teach, talk about Zope 3. Advocate Zope in the IT Market place 4. Organise an Australian Zope conference, maybe the culmination of a 6-12 month campaign 5. Get Zope into the Australian IT media 6. Create a Job Board or some kind of Australian Zope vortal 7. Set-up a Zope.asn.au mailing list 8. Work-out a way to get more resources into Zope in Australia 9. Showcase some Australian Zope (initially Python ?) Zope success stories please email this list or send your initial response to mailto:Zope@synarchy.net -- Nicholas Roberts, Webmaster/Director mailto:Nicholas.Roberts@SYNARCHY.NET -- Websystems Information Australia ABN: 95 052 408 849 http://websystems.com.au

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ZWiki 0.7.1 released
by Simon Michael 03 Nov '00

03 Nov '00

ZWiki 0.7.1 is a (recommended) bugfix release. * fixed broken line-ending handling and non-rendering of initial lines containing ":" in dtml modes * return to the wiki page after clicking the reparent button * added warning of incompatibility with old dtml methods to readme Download: http://zope.org/Members/simon/ZWiki Thanks!

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