[Zope-Annce] July 26th Zope Weekly News

ethan mindlace fremen mindlace@digicool.com
Wed, 26 Jul 2000 20:56:24 -0400


Zope Book has a license, a Product Developer's Guide in the works,
some thoughts on useability, ZTopics in the 
PTK, Zope Studio demonstrated, Zope.org continues to 
evolve, and more...                      

The opinions expressed in Zope Weekly news are solely the authors',
and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope Community
at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition.

You can always get to the most recent Zope Weekly News
with "one convenient URL",
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/current

And Now For Something Completely Different:

Documentation

  -- by Michel Pelletier

 
    A good compromise has been reached with the O'Reilly folks with
    regard to the Book license.  Before publication of the book, the
    material will be posted online but will NOT be under an open
    content license.  After the book is completed and has gone to the
    press, then O'Reilly will release the book under a still
    to-be-determined open content license.  This is good news because
    that means our material will be available soon!

    Michel has finished up the HTML and DocBook upload/redering/TOC
    scripts for the book using StructuredTextNG, the new
    StructuredText system that works with DOM.  A nice side effect of
    this is that StructuredText now supports DocBook output.  Last
    week was spent expanding on chapter by chapter outlines and moving
    old material into its new location in the outline.

    Amos spent last week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention where
    he gave some presentations, demos, and hammered out the agreement
    with the editors on the license issue.  This week we will be
    polishing up the material for public presentation Real Soon Now.

    Chris McDonough has finished about a quarter of the security chapter

    of the Product Developer's Guide.  Material for the PDG will be
released
    piecemeal as it is completed and thus the security chapter should be
    available for online perusal Real Soon Now (maybe two more weeks --
    sorry folks, doing this on weekends).  To contribute content to the
    Product Developer's Guide, check out "the Product Developer's
Guide",
    http://www.zope.org/Wikis/Docs/ProductDevelopersGuide
    to get an understanding of what the aim of the document is, 
    and contact "Chris via email",
    mailto:chrism@digicool.com

Zope Status

 -- by Brian Lloyd

Summary

  Notes from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey.


Last week highlights

  Most of last week was consumed by OSCON in Monterey. There was a lot 
  of traffic at the Zope booth - many people who knew _of_ Zope and 
  wanted to learn more. There were quite a lot of Perl hackers at the 
  conference, and they were pretty happy to hear that ActiveState (who 
  also had a big presence at OSCON) expects to make an initial alpha  
  of their Perl support for Zope in a matter of weeks. 

  We also talked usability with some of the Zopistas at the conference. 
  Even though our usability BOF was rescheduled to 10 pm, moved to a 
  different building, printed up as the "Zope Visibility" BOF and 
  scheduled opposite a Free Beer bash, around 20 die-hards managed to 
  find Amos Lattier, Paul Everitt and me to talk about improving the 
  Zope usability story.

  Topics included jargon control, consistency and the difficulty of 
  creating new components whether through ZClasses or as Python based 
  products. We obviously have plenty to do on this front - improving 
  usability will be one of our main goals in the weeks and months to 
  come. The folks at the BOF also gave pretty good reviews to the 
  dev.zope.org site and its potential for improving the situation. 

  In other news, Tom Yager of InfoWorld published a "largely positive 
  review of Zope 2.2 (beta 3)",

  http://www.infoworld.com/articles/mt/xml/00/07/17/000717mtzope.xml

  Unfortunately he was using some old or inaccurate information and 
  lists ZEO as an expensive add-on product rather than as Open Source.
  Hopefully this will be remedied (though there are some who have 
  warned me not to count on it...)


This week

  This week we will be catching up on 2.2 upgrade issues and moving 
  forward with some of proposals on dev.zope.org. I also hope to 
  write up a more in-depth version of the usability issues we talked 
  about at the BOF and try to identify a bite-sized chunk that would 
  be a good candidate for a Fishbowl project.


Recent PTK Happenings

  -- by Tres Seaver

 * Shane Hathaway "checked in", 
    http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-July/001182.html
   a set of refactorings which make it possible to use the PTK without
   the ZPatterns or LoginManager products.

 * Monty Taylor, Chris Withers, Dan Pierson, and Shane "discussed",
    http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-July/001139.html
   adding "mappable roles" (qua "groups") to the permissions machinery

 * Steve Alexander "kicked off",
    http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-July/001195.html
   a fruitful discussion of extensible workflow, and created a "wiki",
    http://www.zope.org/Members/stevea/WorkflowStates
   to track the results.

 * Steve also posted a "pointer to using ZTopics with PTK to create
   a 'virtual hierarchy'",
    http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-July/001246.html

PTK Tracker Vitals, 2000/07/25

 Here is is the current state of the tracker::

  Type / Status   New     Closed     Current

    Bug Reports    3         0          22

Zope Studio

  Last week:

    - Paul Everitt demonstrated a highly hacked up version of Zope
Studio at
      the O'Reilly Open Source Conference last week. With it, he was
able to
      edit DTML code on a Zope Server, save the changes, and show the
results.
      All this from within one application window.

    - Due to a bug in XPI, I wasn't able to get Zope Studio to properly
      install on Mozilla through the web.
    
  This week:

    - Flow back some of the work done for the special O'Reilly Open
Source
      convention demo version.

    - If the XPI bug is fixed this week, get the XPI install to work.

  Statistics:

    Two tracker issues related to special work for the O'Reilly
conference
    (which were hidden from view for most people), were closed.


    Feature/Doc
       Requests    0         0          15 


Zope Web

  -- by Ethan Fremen

  This Week

     o Changed www.zope.org from ProxyPass to a RewriteRule,
       enabling the other rewrite rules to do their job.

     o Further confirming my destiny to hit every packing
       error, I spent the pre-dawn hours "packing zope.org",
       http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-web/2000-July/000071.html

     o Worked on cataloguing the products to provide a topic
       view of them.  It sort of works: You're welcome to
       see the "work in progress",
       http://www.zope.org/Products/external_access
       Unfortunately, this work has caused all products to
       report that they were created on july 21.

  Next week

     o ZEO transition was delayed for jim's return, but
       we should be moving on that soon.

     o Get Products page working

     o Start the Zope Site Project, wherein we redevelop
       the products that zope uses, within the fishbowl,
       to play nice with the PTK.