Metadata, Developer's Guide update, new Zope.org progress, Lots of Page Template Proposals, and more in this week's news. 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 Zope Weekly News", mail:zope-web@zope.org for possible inclusion. ------ Upcoming Events EuroZope Conference The EuroZope crew is organizing a two day Zope only conference in Berlin on the 12th and 13th of July. Those interested in participating should join the discussion on the "EuroZope mailinglist", http://www.comlounge.net/mailman/listinfo/eurozope ------ Get Zope T-shirts! Ever have a hankering for a giant blue orb on your back? Well, now you can satisfy your craving. Score some "Zope Shirts":http://www.zope.org/Resources/Store and you'll be set. ------ Zope Developer's Guide by Michel Pelletier I'm happy to announce a new release of the Zope Developer's Guide, "available in HTML format", http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZDG/ The new guide contains many improvements and elaborations over the previous HTML release, and has benefited from the review and contributions from many community members including well-known object-orienteers Jim Fulton, Guido van Rossum and Bruce Eckel. This will be the last "preview" release of the Dev guide before we release the first edition alongside the release of Zope 2.4. As usual, any problems suggestions should be noted in the "SourceForge tracker", http://sourceforge.net/projects/zope-devel/ ------ CMF News by Seb and Jon Traffic on zope-cmf was a little calmer this week, and the majority of it seemed to come from people noticing that the CMFDecor product doesn't work. Andrew "suggests":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007488.html removing the CMF Decor folder for now. In the mean time, don't worry - it's not an essential part of the CMF. Workgroups It's not always clear how to apply Zope's Security machinery to 'workgroup' scenarios. Jens "posted":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007537.html his ideas for implementing Workgroups in CMF. Shane "showed":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007578.html how you might accomplish a similar thing using his cutting-edge DCWorkflow. The discussion continued in a slightly different direction following "Scott's post":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007577.html on subjects/metadata. Will CMF become the "weapon of choice" for intranet managers? Metadata - The Next Generation The use and application of Dublin Core Metadata has come under scrutiny this week. Tim Lynch "posted":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007434.html some useful background information on the uses of Dublin Core in the "World Outside CMF" (tm) - to which Tres "responded":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007448.html with more details of DC's perspective on the DC. Subclassing the DublinCore each time you want to extend it can be a bit of a pain. Shane "proposes":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007570.html a new implementation; Tres turns fashion-guru and introduces "aspect bags":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007587.html - every well dressed content-object will be carrying one this summer. "Aspect oriented programming":http://www.parc.xerox.com/csl/projects/aop/? Lesser mortals reach for their "dictionaries":http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/highley99aspect.html! Bite-Sized Chunks Seb released a "first cut":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007608.html of his Mailin Product. We're one step closer to updating from the beach! Chris W leaked the news that Swishdot will incorporate this functionality, giving a mailinglist/weblog cross - genetic-engineering at its best! Some useful "tips":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007474.html from Jeff on how to get CMFWiki working from CVS... and Tres "clarifies":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007501.html DC's thinking on the future of this product. In short, you can use it, but it's not 'supported' officially. "Zopefish":http://zopefish.weblogs.com/2001/06/08 dives into CMF. Onlookers drool at the prospect of Zopefish/CMF integration! Has anyone told "Dave Winer":http://www.scripting.com? Marc's Colour-Guide undergoes "cosmetic surgery":http://cmf.zope.org/Members/grifter70000/color_guide, courtesy of Dr Grifter. Are you thinking of running several CMFs in the same Zope instance? Want to share common skins? So does "Chris W":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007500.html - Shane "suggests":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007509.html filesystem-based skins The "CMF Dogbowl Calendar":http://cmf.zope.org/calendar/calendar is up and running. One to watch for forthcoming Zope-related events. Silly Stats (last week's figures in brackets):: 159 messages (350) 42 people posted (50) 55% were by 12% of people (70%:40%) 8 bugs were resolved (?) 3 were submitted (?) ------ Page Templates Page Templates are already quite useful, but there's been a lot of activity lately on "proposed changes", http://www.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZPT/ProposedChanges including * Replace Inner Text -- editors tend to be a touch indiscriminant about how they mark up code: your attribute markup can have font tags and other markup inserted inside it. What should happen then? * Variable Expansion in Paths -- it would be nice if the path could include components that are actually variables. * Disappearing tags -- it would be nice if some marked up tags went away after they are done doing their dynamic thing. A new tal attribute and a block tag have been proposed as solutions. * Search And Replace -- somewhat related to the prior issue, having some way of specifying placeholders that indicate items to be replaced in non-marked up text (think JavaScript) would be nice. * Commenting -- A tal:comment directive? There's more! Go to the page templates project and join in the discussion. ------ Zope Web by Ethan Fremen "Zope.org enhancement", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZopeOrgCollaborationEnhancement Skin Madness ...Page Templates are a lot of fun. At the end of this project you'll be able to view_source on the zope.org site and get loads of good ZPT examples! The "workflow", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZopeOrgCollaborationEnhancement/ WorkFlow has received a lot of work, thanks to Jens Vagelpohl. Work on a redirector to support the migration machinery is also near completion, thanks to Andreas Jung. -EOT-