There have been complaints about zope.org. The complaints include things like "the design is ugly", "the navigation is difficult", "it's too slow", and "search results are not useful." For a long time there have been plans to convert the site to the current version of Zope using CMF, and various false starts have been made, but so far the site is still running software that's best described "FrakenZope 2.3"... I opened my big mouth, and now I'm responsible for fixing this. :-) Actually, a new plan was already in place, and all I have to do is coach its execution. Zope Corporation has retained a highly skilled Zope developer, Sidnei da Silva, to do the work. The advantage over Zope Corporation developers doing this (as has been tried in the past) is that Sidnei isn't likely to be pre-empted by higher-priority customer work: for him, this *is* customer work, the customer being Zope Corporation. At the same time, because Sidnei is being paid, the expectation is that the plan will be carried out at a steady pace, as opposed to simply "letting the community sort it out." Sidnei's plan includes the following pieces: - use Zope 2.6 with CMF 1.3 for the new site - use a new skin design, the winner of the zope.org contest - use the new ZCTextIndex search engine - migrate all existing users and as much content as practical to the new site (There's more, but we'd be getting into detail territory.) The project goals include minimizing the amount of new code and content to be created, in order to minimize the risks of failure. We also strive to make future maintenance of the site simpler, both at the sysadmin level (process and resource control) and at the webmaster level (content control). All these goals are designed to make sure that the site can be kept current once the upgrade is in place. Time-wise, Sidnei expects a preview version of the new site to go up as new.zope.org within a month, and the final version to go live (replacing the old www.zope.org) within 2-3 months after that. Sidnei expects to be asking community help with some tasks; he'll post about this himself. In addition, we're also hoping to hire Sidnei as part-time webmaster for zope.org, starting next week. Having a steady webmaster will help the site stay accurate and up-to-date. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)