Hi. A couple of us came together before the Plone conference to work on various Zope related topics. We worked on the following areas: - storing parent pointers (elro, davisagli): we have a branch of Zope that changes OFS to store parent pointers and fixed the issues that arose in copy/cut/paste and zexp export code. There's an issue remaining with Acquisition, where we lost some protection against cycle protection - I continue working on this. - catalog using intids (rossp): we have branches of Zope, ZCatalog and CMF which change the catalog to use intids as their internal uid and rid. This needs more testing, but looks very promising. Currently it uses plone.app.intid / five.intid to maintain an intid to physical path mapping. Once the parent pointer work is stable, we can stop doing this and load objects directly from the database connection - Chameleon (chaoflow): Florian worked on making Zope use Chameleon by default. This works for the most parts, but there's some problems left in tests, as Chameleon wants an utility to be registered but a lot of tests in Zope and CMF don't use ZCML test layers. - Traversal simplification: Mikko worked on researching traversal and options to simplify it. The first idea was to unify some of the code used for URL, path and path expression traversal to bring those more in line. Not sure how far he got ;) - WebOb (garbas): Rok worked on bringing in WebOb as an underpinning for the request/response objects and making both API's available at the same time. I think the request is done and a good deal of the response works. Doing this means we can deprecate parts of the old request API and encourage the use of the more standard WebOb API. - WSGI (matthewwilkes, hannosch): We fixed the bugs that had been reported about using the current WSGI support (mod_wsgi problems, forced dependency on repoze.who) on trunk and the 2.13 branch. Afterwards Matthew continued on a branch to remove the ZServer/medusa from Zope and leave only the WSGI publisher in place. We had a bunch of other ideas on what to do, like allowing Unicode ids in OFS, working on security and similar large topics. I hope I haven't forgotten anyone. Most of the code currently lives in branches or forks on https://github.com/zopefoundation. We haven't figured out yet how to proceed with that. In terms of copyright all committers to the GitHub repository have signed Zope contributor agreements already, so there's no imminent legal problem. Which of these branches should make it into Zope and for which release is completely open and is going to be up for discussion. On a personal note, I won't be available as the release manager for the next Zope 4 release - as originally outlined in my mail from 2010 (https://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2010-March/039880.html). I'll continue to take care of the maintenance releases for the 2.12 and 2.13 series. At least unless someone else shows an interest in picking up this work. Should there be anyone interested in this position, speak up on this mailing list. Once someone has been found, I'll make sure the person gets documentation and access to all relevant resources. Hanno