Hello everyone, Roger and I are proud to announce the first release of the new form and widget framework ``z3c.form``! After years of talking about it, months of thinking about it and many weeks of implementation, we have finally completed it. For the curious and impatient ... --------------------------------- To run the demos do the following:: $ svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/z3c.formdemo/trunk formdemo $ cd formdemo $ python bootstrap.py $ ./bin/buildout $ ./bin/demo fg Now you can access the demo under: http://localhost:8080/ Since this takes a while to build, you can read on while waiting for the demo to come up. :-) Goals of z3c.form ----------------- While taking the best of the older ``zope.app.form`` and ``zope.formlib`` packages, this new framework provides much more flexibility and hooks as are needed in daily development. For example, creating a simple form can look almost identical to ``zope.formlib``, but integrating sub-forms is much simpler. Another important issue for us was keeping up-to-date with today's latest Web developments, especially AJAX-features. It is an expressed goal of this framework to provide enough flexibility to fully support AJAX-driven forms and widgets. A secondary goal is to provide flexibility to allow experimentation with new ideas without interupting the entire framework. Many of the features are implemented as components allowing simple replacement as desired. State of the Code ----------------- We consider the code feature complete with some real-world user scenarios implemented. The framework has not been used in a production environment yet, but we will base all our future project on it and switch older projects to this framework as needed. z3c.form ~~~~~~~~ This is the main package implementing the framework. It is 100% tested in a multitude of text files; start by reading README.txt, which provides you with an overview and priorities the text files for you. Unit Tests: 478 Documentation: 193k in 24 text files Architecture Layout: form-graph.png, widget-graph.png z3c.formui ~~~~~~~~~~ This package contains some base templates for DIV- and TABLE-based form layouts. Both layout options are implemented in different layers, allowing you to chose either layout default by simply adding the layer to your skin. z3c.formdemo ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Here you will find some small demo sub-packages that demonstrate the framework as it is to be used: * Hello World Message A demo of adding, editing and displaying simple message objects. It demonstrates the simple usage of add, edit and display forms. It also adds another button to the edit form. * Widgets A simple form whose purpose is to demonstrate the completeness of the input widgets. All fields except Dict and Object have an input widget as demonstrated in the form. It also demonstrates how the content object retrieval can be customized in a form. * Calculator A simple calculator implemented as a form. The demo shows how to write different types of buttons, register handlers for those button types and hook in a custom action manager. * Wizard This simple, linear wizard demonstrates the sub-form capabilities of ``z3c.form``. Since these packages do not provide an object widget, this demostration also shows how this need can bebetter solved using sub-forms. * Table/Spreadsheet This little table allows you to add and edit a simple content component within a table. The table is rendered using the ```zc.table`` package demonstrating how the two packages can be used together. jquery.* ~~~~~~~~ The ``jquery`` namespace packages provide a first attempt to have AJAX-enabled forms. It is already possible to validate widget values and do some other form-unrelated UI goodies. The features within the ``jquery`` and form packages will soon be demonstrated in detail on the new www.zope.org website, which will also be available in code form as ``z3c.website``. So stay tuned! Installation ------------ All packages have been released in source and binary-egg format on PyPI and ``download.zope.org/distribution``. You can use setuptools to install them. Here is a list of all packages: * z3c.form * z3c.formui * z3c.formdemo * jquery.javascript * jquery.layer * jquery.widget Enjoy! Regards, Roger and Stephan