[Zope-Annce] November 8th Zope Weekly News

Tue, 07 Nov 2000 23:56:28 -0500

Structured Documents, Wikis for Now, Documentation process, 
more Write Locking, HiperDOM, Quick Management fixes,
*Zope: The Definitive Guide*, count the Zopatistas,
and clustering Zope.org   

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.

If you or your company are doing something cool with zope,
"submit it to the Zope Weekly News",
   mailto:zope-web@zope.org
for possible inclusion.

And Now For Something Completely Different:

---

Zope Status

  by Brian Lloyd

Summary

  Getting ready for 2.2.3

Recent News

  Last week saw a number of new proposals in the Fishbowl at 
  dev.zope.org. Fred Drake, a newly acquired member of the DC 
  team added a proposal for Structured Documents that can 
  interoperate with a wide range of tools and render themselves 
  in a "variety of formats",

  http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/StructuredDocument

  Ken Manheimer started the "Wiki for now",          
  http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/WikiForNow
  proposal, aimed at 
  resolving some of the immediate shortcomings of the current 
  Wiki product regarding its use for dev.zope.org. The idea here 
  is to spend a short amount of time fixing the most painful problems 
  that impede progress in the Fishbowl.             

  Documentation is currently a weak area for Zope. Ironically, the 
  problem really isn't a lack of content, its a lack of organization 
  among those who produce useful documentation. The current
documentation 
  "process" is not well-defined, so Amos and Michel have started a 
  Fishbowl project to develop and formalize the process of producing 
  Zope documentation. The end result of this will be a well-known and 
  "discoverable process",

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DocumentationProcess/FrontPage             
  that will allow the community to take better 
  advantage of the documentation energy out there:

  Jeffrey Shell continues to make progress on analysis on the "Write 
  Locking project",
  http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/WriteLocking/FrontPage
  to support DAV-aware Web tools that require DAV 
  locking support on the server:        

  HiperLogica and Martijn Pieters are working on fleshing out the
  HiperDom project and moving various bits of HiperDom info into 
  the Fishbowl. Zopistas interested in this project to add XMLC-like 
  templating to Zope should visit the new HiperDom development home 
  and get their "licks in now",
  http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/HiperDom/FrontPage
  while the requirements are being formalized.

  Also, Adam Davis has sent a final request for comment on his proposal 
  for several "quick fixes",

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/ManagementInterfaceQuickFix
  that we could make to the Zope management interface to improve 
  productivity in the 2.3 release timeframe.        

Near Future  

  I had hoped to get 2.2.3 out this week, but there are still a few 
  loose ends to tie up. I hope to (finally) get the fix for the 
  infamous "__call__" bug included among other things.

  We have started some work behind the scenes to apply better 
  organization to dev.zope.org to make it easier to find what you 
  are looking for and to get "at a glance" status for various projects 
  and proposals. Some of this will be bound up with the "Wiki for now" 
  project, but there will be at least some organizational progress 
  before that project is finished.

---

Documentation

  by Michel Pelletier

  Amos and I spend much of last week *not* working on the book (yeah, we
  couldn't believe it either).  Although we did handle the usual dozen
  or so comments, suggestions, and revisions sent to us by you wonderful
  community people about the book, most of our time was spent writing up
  a proposal and prototype for the Brand Spankin' New Digital Creations
  Documentation Process.  What is that, you ask?

  As it stands Digital Creations has no process for authoring, editing,
  delivering, or maintaining, documentation.  This, obviously, creates
  lots of problems.  How many resources to we throw at documentation? 
  How is it done?  Who edits it, and when?  Where can it be found? 
  Who is it intended for?

  Over the past year, Amos and I have worked up a specific *instance* of
  a documentation process for developing a Zope book.  After some
  consideration, and meta-thought, we have put together a proposal and
  prototype documentation process.  For the OO-illuminati among you, you
  can think of this as a *class* that defines a generic process which
  will be used in certain instances to create documentation artifacts
(for
  example, we used it to create the *Zope Book*).

  But obviously Amos and I have experience writing only one artifact, so
  we need your help to make this process a real thing that will really
  help. So "check it out",

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DocumentationProcess/FrontPage
  over at "dev.zope.org",
  http://dev.zope.org/ and tell us what you think.

  Many thanks, and on that note, what ZWN would be complete without me
  plugging "the Zope Book":http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/ at
  least once?  But I do have some real news, it looks like O'Reilly has
  decided that the book title will be *Zope: The Definitive Guide*,
which is a
  bit of a misnomer because it *isn't* definitive, it's didactic.  But
the
  marketroids hath spoke, and so it shall be.  Till next week.

---

Zope Web

  -- by Ethan Fremen

 How Many Zopatistas?

  Zope gets downloaded from zope.org 12-15,000 times a month.
  It has risen steadily over the last year and a half.  Zope
  has been downloaded roughly 200,000 times since version 2.0.

  Zope is distributed on all major linux distributions, but
  there's no way of tracking those.

  Netcraft asserts that there are 937 servers 
  "reporting themselves as zope",
  http://www.netcraft.com/survey/Reports/0010/byserver/Zope/index.html

  Note that this only works for proxy-passed or naked zopes,
  not pc/fast-cgi'd sites.  For example, CodeIt shows up as Apache.
  Another reason to encourage the practice of proxy-passing :) 
  I think it may be safe to assume that at most, 1/2 of live zope
  sites use proxy passing.

  There are 1617 members of zope@zope.org and 409 members of zope-dev.
  There are 200,000 unique visits to zope.org every month (ok, that's a
  record :).

  Therefore, I believe there are at least 2000 zope sites and 10,000
  - 20,000 people who have used zope at least once, though they may not
  admit it if they're running for election.

 Zope Heads East for Winter

  Zope is finally going to be moving to a three-system cluster!
  When you've got a completely dynamic website with over 10,000
  pages of content, 256mb ram just doesn't cut it any more.

  We've got a nice system up with the folks at baymountain.com,
  which includes one Storage Server and two ZEO Client servers,
  in the addition to a load balancer.  This way, no spider should
  get in our way, and as our usage grows, we'll just be able
  to add more commodity boxen as ZEO clients to handle the load!

  You can go visit our tenuous "migration plan",
  http://www.zope.org/Wikis/zope-web/MigrationPlan
  as long as you promise to remember that the best
  laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley.

 Vote!

  Here's something for all you international folks who're
  sick and tired of United States elections, and something
  more important for those of you who've made the choice
  between Gush or Bore:  Renaming Python Methods.

  Python Methods have a poor name, because you can have a
  python method that lives on the filesystem.  Furthermore,
  we're going to have Perl methods soon, and maybe tcl
  methods and java methods and Assembly methods... ok,
  probably not assembly methods.

  Anyway, take the poll, and help decide what- if anything-
  methodish objects in zope should be called.

 Documentation Overview

  Rik Hoekstra has submitted a rough draft of the Documentation
  Overview:  Take a "look at it",
  http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ORganization/Use
  and "send in your comments",
  zope-web@zope.org

-EOT-