Hi all. Now that Zope 2.1.0 is out the door, we at DC want to let the community know our direction and the "roadmap" leading to 2.2. In a nutshell, our direction and focus will be on usability. Making it easier to get things done with Zope has been a recurring theme on the lists lately, and we will be working to make progress on this front. For 2.2, here is the short list of we will be working on: o Online Help System - Amos has been doing great work on a real honest-to-goodness online help system for Zope that will make its debut in 2.2. o Python Methods - work will be done to include Evan Simpson's Python Methods in the Zope core. This should help a lot in avoiding the headaches of convoluted DTML logic. o Site Objects - will make it easier to deploy "virtual sites" in the same Zope with far less effort than is required now. o The ability to associate ZClasses as "brains" for relational database data instead of having to write Python classes. o And of course, fixes for bugs and issues in the Collector. We are expecting to have these things available in at least a pre-release by the time of the Zope track at the Python Conference. There are other usability initiatives underway as well. Rob and Amos have been doing a _lot_ of work coming up with a much better and much more scalable approach to documentation that should have a big impact on the quality and breadth of documentation. Work will also continue on making Zope.org a better resource with things like ZTopics (Yahoo-style directory views). And there are some other projects percolating (which I can't talk about yet :) that will have a big impact on usability. Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com