[Zope-Annce] Zope at the European LinuxTag 2000 (29th of June - 2nd of July)

[Maik Roeder]

Zope at the European LinuxTag 2000 (29th of June - 2nd of July)

Zope was part of the European LinuxTag 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany.
On the four days of the show both commercial companies and the Open
Source and Free Software communities came together to show their
activity surrounding GNU/Linux to the 17.000 visitors. 

We had many Zope developers coming from all over Germany, but also
from as far away as France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands,
who helped organizing the conference, man the Zope booth at the 
Open Source Pavillion, give talks and hold BOF sessions. Besides
demonstrating Zope to the visitors of LinuxTag, we had a lot of
opportunity to meet fellow European Zope developers, and many
fruitful discussions arose. We finally got to meet each other in real
life after having known each other a long time on the mailing lists.

On the 29th of June, the first European ZopeCon took place with talks
and a tutorial track. We counted 20 to 40 people in the talks, and
around 12 people in the tutorial track, which was somewhat surprising,
given the fact that we had less than four weeks time for preparing the
whole event.

The ZopeCon talks opened with an introduction to Zope by Thilo Mezger
from innominate AG. Then Mechthild Hofmann, a journalist and web
designer, talked about her reasons for using Zope. Next came Ryan
Hughes from Neuberger & Hughes, who spoke about the soon to be
released version 2.0 of Worldpilot. With Worldpilot, you can manage
e-mail over an IMAP server, access your addresses, keep track of
todo-lists and make use of a calendar.

The next talk was given by Robert Segall, who spoke in an amusing way
about his experiences of realizing e-commerce sites with Zope, and
about his difficulties getting ISPs to host Zope sites. His tip: You
should not mention to your ISP that Zope is this cool web application
server! Instead, just say it's simple CGI script. A question came what
to do about Apache configuration in that case. It's easy: you call the
support line of the ISP and ask them to add a small line in the Apache
configuration file, because you have some problem with your new
account ;-). In Robert's own words: it's easy! Robert hopes he can
release the code for his electronic commerce sites as Open Source.

Then there was a talk by Jan Haul about realizing projects in a
company, followed by Martijn Faassen, who talked about XML and
Zope. Zope is moving towards a system where you can treat Zope objects
as XML and XML as Zope objects. This combination will have powerful
applications for both XML and Zope. The last Zope talk was given by
Joachim Werner from Ioveno, who described what role Zope plays in his
business model.

In the tutorial sessions Stephan Richter from Digital Creations,
Martijn Faassen and Joachim Werner from Iuveno held a question and
answer session about a wide variety Zope issues. There were also BOF
sessions about Zope, Zope and e-commerce and Zope documentation from
friday to sunday. These often moved from their true topic into ad-hoc
tutorials on Zope.

Overall we think Zope at LinuxTag was a great success! As a result,
we're now in the process of organizing an EuroZope community with
mailinglist and website, partially so we can better prepare for future
European Zope gatherings, and partially because we had so much fun
getting to know each other.