Many of you have probably already enjoyed Maik Jablonski's fantastic visual editor Epoz. More than two months ago, Paul Everitt published an extensive proposal on refactoring Maik's original code base. After having received positive feedback and funding by the Dutch-based Zope expert and creator of Silva Infrae (http://www.infrae.com), Paul Everitt (Zope Europe Association), Guido Wesdorp (Infrae), Philipp von Weitershausen (philiKON) and Geir Bækholt (Plone Solutions) started hacking, using the main concepts from the proposal. After more than two months, we are now proud to release a first alpha version of what will be the next generation of the epoz editor. What's new? - The core of the editor essentially is only a file-system based skin layer. Target-platform (Zope2, CMF, Plone, Zope3) specific skin layers can then do their customization based on core. - The richtext editing widget with its buttons and toolboxes is displayed using ZPT macros. This and the usage of CSS to define the looks of the editor makes epoz more customizable than ever. Using ZPTs also has the incredible advantage that epoz can even opened in a browser from the file system or be made available through Apache. - Translation is done using the i18n namespace suported by both Zope2 and Zope3 TAL. - Document centric editing and the option of synchronous and asynchronous, as well as data-oriented (POST) and document-oriented (PUT) saving. - Works as a drop-in product for Zope2, Silva, CMF 1.4, Plone (in the future) and Zope3 (in the future). Where can I get it? You may download a tarball at the the epoz project homepage at Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=84377 How can I use it? Please be aware that epoz 1.0 alpha a) is a complete rewrite of Epoz 0.X and b) is alpha software. epoz comes with a great deal of documentation already. The INSTALL.txt file in the 'doc' directory should provide a quick introduction. Note that epoz 1.0 and Epoz 0.X cannot be used together in the same Zope instance. If you would like to see epoz 1.0 alpha1 in action without having to go through a long installation orgy, you may either download the tarball and open 'common/epozmacros.html' in your browser (yes, it works off the filesystem!) or visit the following URL (served by Apache, by the way): http://www.philikon.de/files/epoz/common/epozmacros.html What to expect before 1.0: - Link and image toolbox: The original Epoz editor provided a toolbox for Plone users that was loaded in a browser pop-up window. Since epoz 1.0 puts a lot of focus on document-centric editing, it places toolbox elements such as a link or image browser and table creator right on the edit page. Results for link and image searching will be loaded asynchronously in a yet-to-defined XML format. In upcoming releases, we will provide asynronous server-side methods for link and image searching in Zope2, CMF, Plone and Zope3. - Plone integration: Although we have made an effort to integrate it with Plone 1.0/2.0, we have seen that current versions of Plone does not allow an editor to take over for document-centric editing. Philipp has made a Plone Improvement Proposal (PLIP) to provide a visual editing architecture in Plone (http://plone.org/development/current/projects/PLIP5). The proposal has been accepted by the community and Philipp is currently implementing. It is expected that Plone 2.1 will be ready to be plugged together with epoz 1.0. How to report bugs? As part of the process of moving away from Sourceforge for developemnt, we have set up a tracker at Codespeak.net. Feel free to report any bugs you encounter at: http://codespeak.net/issues/epoz/ (mind the trailing slash) We are looking forward to your comments. For the epoz developers, Philipp von Weitershausen