WELCOME TO THE ZOPE 3 NEWSLETTER: ISSUE 6 (16 JAN 2003) Welcome to the sixth Zope 3 newsletter. Information about Zope 3 and newsletter contributions and suggestions can be found at the bottom of this newsletter. GLOSSARY FOR THE UNINITIATED Encounter a term in this newsletter you don't know? Try this glossary: http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/NewsletterGlossary NEWS SNIPPETS: - Hopefully you noticed the first Zope 3 alpha release on December 31, 2002! Congratulations to the people who worked long and hard hours to make it happen. http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/Downloads - Tres Seaver implemented the core behavior for some of the relationship types discussed in http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/RelationshipService These will hopefully find their way into the Zope 3 CVS soonish. :-) - Jim Fulton wrote a "science fiction" proposal of how through-the-web site development is planned to work. It brought forth a flood of responses on the Zope 3 list; for one thing, as far as I can tell, if you use ZClasses, we want to pick your brain. :-) See http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/ThroughTheWebSiteDevelopment and then if you are really intrigued start slogging through the mailing list archives (you have your work cut out for you!) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-dev/2003-January/004921.html STEPHAN RICHTER: Locale Support and On-line Help Locale Support Over Christmas I finished the implementation of the Locale Support Proposal: http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/I18nFormatLocaleSupport While it was overshadowed by some license problems (that are now resolved) and some grief with time.strptime() on Windows, the zope.i18n.locales is a powerful package to localize everything around number and datetime objects. Since I utilized the ICU project's XML-based locale information, we have now full support of all locales that ICU supports! At the heart of the locale support lies the zope.i18n.format module, which can be used independently of the locales package. It can read number and date/time format patterns. It then uses these binary patterns to parse for example date/time strings into datetime objects or convert datetime objects to strings. All of the code is accompanied by over 450 tests. Some of the ToDo-items include documentation, integration into ZPT and the Translation Service, and maybe restructuring the Translation Service to use Locales instead of Message Catalogs. On-line Help I also implemented http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/OnlineHelp The On-line Help is supposed to be incredibly similar to Zope 2's Help. Since currently we do not have STX or ReST implemented in Zope 3, I was able to implement the proposal only for plain text files. You can access the On-line help from everywhere adding ++help++ to the URL, like in http://localhost:8080/++help++ Furthermore, if you want to see the OnlineHelp in action, you should create a File and click on Upload; look at the right column of the screen and you will see an 'online help' box. We urgently need people to write documentation for the on-line help, documenting the various screens and functionality! JAN SMITH and GUS GOLLING: Calling all designers!! Zope 3 development is not for experienced python coders only. People with graphic skills, user interface layout skills and tutorial skills are also strongly needed. In preparation for graphic and user interface design work to be done as part of the upcoming Australian Zope 3 Sprint (Melbourne, date TBA), members of OzZope, the Australian Zope Interest Group, have chatted with members of the Zope 3 Dev team on IRC. Gus Golling and I decided to volunteer. We have been helping with some graphics for the UI, and also have started a Design Style Guide. The guide gathers suggestions and images about the possible directions for the 'style' of the Zope 3 User Interface, beyond the exciting developments resulting from the Rotterdam Sprint work. Areas under discussion are the Zope 3 logo, Zope 3 object icons, buttons, skin switcher (in conjunction with Zope 3 dev team work), typographic style guide and color schemes. http://www.ozzope.org/OzSprintWiki/StyleGuideZope3 We have also had a couple of collaborative international efforts on IRC - they have been fun and productive. Please send an email to zope3-dev@zope.org if you would like to help out too! R. DAVID MURRAY: Authentication Service optimization and polish Based on Jim's instructions, I rewrote the the auth service (zope/app/services/auth.py) to speed up user lookup by dropping the BTreeContainer mixin, switching to using two BTrees for the data (principal id and username), and implementing the rest of IContainer directly on the auth class. I then altered IPrincipal to include a getRoles attribute, implemented it on the PrincipalBase class, and altered the zopepolicy security policy to grab the Authentication service and use the getRoles method of the principal to compute the base roles instead of using only anonymous, as it did before. STEVE ALEXANDER: Coding and Helping Here's what I can remember of what I've been up to recently: * Various things for the Zope 3 alpha, including work on the event service with Gary Poster, and renaming the ObjectHub service to the HubIds service, upon discussion with Gary and Casey Duncan. * At Alexander Limi's request, converted the form generation code to use div elements rather than table rows:: <div class="row"> <div class="label">Form label</div> <div class="field"><input ..... ></div> </div> This will make CSS-based layout much easier. * Helped Albert from Codeworks with his work on exposing named adapters in the local adapters service, and making the local utilities service (still a work in progress). Albert has done most of the work on these, though. * Still working on the query service. * With Albert from Codeworks, preparing further work on the schemagen project. This is the work that Martijn Faassen and I started at the sprint in Vilnius and can be summarised as "zclasses done right for zope 3". CONTRIBUTING Please send Zope 3 news, and newsletter suggestions and requests, to zope-news@zope.org, with "Zope 3" somewhere in the subject line. As you can see, casual and quick news items are acceptable and even desirable. MORE INFORMATION ON ZOPE 3 The central place to find Zope 3 information is currently http://dev.zope.org/Zope3 The Zope 3 mailing list is archived and managed at http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-dev The Zope 3 development IRC channel, #zope3-dev at irc.openprojects.net is (strictly) for discussion of Zope 3 development issues. Newsletters are archived at http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/Zope3Newsletter