[ZDP] ZDP status

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

I'd like to give you all a status report on what's been going on with
the ZDP.

Things have been going quietly for a while, but Martijn Pieters today
made things move again.

We have a basic zdp.zope.org site up and running. We've made plans on
CoolFAQ, the Next Generation Zope Based FAQ tool. Pavlos probably has
the most documents on what our design criterea are. Perhaps he'd like to
dump the documents that he has on the zdp.zope.org site so we can refer
to them easily.

Pavlos, Martijn Pieters and I have shell account access to the
zdp.zope.org that Brian Brown so generously provided for us. Digital
Creations chipped in with contributing ZTables to the ZDP web site.
ZTables is the not (yet) open source Zope product (Thanks Paul!) that
can do cool database stuff with the Zope database (I'm still figuring
out its full potential). We'll use ZTables to create CoolFAQ.

A question that came up is that using a non-open source product like
ZTables will prevent us from the free distribution of CoolFAQ to others.
Ideally we'd of course like CoolFAQ to be in the hands of many users.
It's probably good therefore to motivate why we decided to use ZTables
after all:

* ZTables is way cool. :) It makes it easier to set up CoolFAQ.

* ZTables is not open source now, but it's quite possible it will be in
the future

* If CoolFAQ is ZTables based and works well, this is another possible
argument for Digital Creations to release ZTables into open source.

* One of the arguments of Digital Creations to keep ZTables out of open
source right now is because it would cost too much time to support it.
There is, for instance, not enough documentation on it. The ZDP can
contribute to this documentation.

* The DigiCool guys are nice guys -- we don't expect they'll evilly
profit from our hard work on CoolFAQ or whatever. Likewise, even if
they'll evilly profit from our hard work on CoolFAQ, we're nice enough
we won't complain too loudly about this. If you feel this is wrong,
please don't invest any of your hard work into CoolFAQ. :)

Feedback on all this is welcome from everybody. If possible
diplomatically/strategically/politically, it would be nice if Digital
Creations gave some feedback on this too, so that we know whether or not
to get our hopes up or down regarding the open sourcing of ZTables. If
not that's okay too.

If you've read this far through all this, you might still be interested
in helping the ZDP out. Just mail me if you want a Zope account on the
zdp.zope.org site. If you want to do something that requires shell
access (such as installing an external method), please contact me,
Martijn Pieters or Pavlos, the core ZDP cabal^W group. :)

Regards,

Martijn