[Zope-Annce] September 6th Zope Weekly News
ethan mindlace fremen
mindlace@digicool.com
Wed, 06 Sep 2000 04:27:58 -0400
Merely 4 hours past the deadline, the Zope Weekly News
lands with a heaping helping of goodies: Rapid
Zope Book evolution, lots of fish in the bowl,
Zope skin, PTK proliferation, and Zope.org replication.
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:
<hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%>
Documentation
-- by Michel Pelletier
This week (a shorty due to Labor day) Amos and I are polishing up
spelling, added image and figure semantics to structured text (and
extended the HTML and SGML generators to spit them out, yum!).
Normalized all the font and style conventions, and started on chapter
1 screenshots. Yeah! I fleshed out a lot of Chapter 9 (Cataloging)
also. As always, you can "see the latest and greatest version",
http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/
<hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%>
Zope Status
-- by Brian Lloyd
Summary
Zope 2.2.1 release, progress on dev.zope.org projects
Recent highlights
ZWN has been spotty lately so to recap, Zope 2.2.1 was released
August 25th. Lots and lots of bugs were fixed for 2.2.1, and it
seems to have covered the issues that were keeping people from
moving to 2.2. There have been two reported problems with custom
ZClasses after updating to 2.2.1, but we have not been able to
reproduce them and they do not seem to be a general problem.
There has been a fair amount of activity on dev.zope.org, with
a number of new proposals for things such as session tracking
and a unit testing support framework. Chris McDonough gets the
prolific-proposal-writer-of-the-week award :) The new security
assertion proposal has been made into an active project, and
the first draft of the first deliverable (the Zope developer's
guide to product security) is "available for review and feedback",
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DeclarativeSecurity/ZopeSecurityForDevelopers
There are also a number of proposal where discussion seems to have
petered out - we'll need to start looking at these over time and
decide how to either get champions to refine them and move them
forward or put them in some sort of proposal archive.
In other news, FourThought continues to work on the new
XMLDocument and will shortly be starting on the XSL Templates
project.
This week
This week we will be starting to firm up a todo list for the next
Zope feature release and trying to get the declarative security
"user manual" finalized - after that we'll begin implementing the
new assertion style for the next feature release.
<hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%>
Zope Studio
-- by Martijn Pieters
Zope Studio
Due to other project work, no news this week
Skinnable And Localizable Objects
After two weeks of holidaying in Scotland, I am back at the keys.
Week of 13-08
- Architecture finalised.
- Implemented all core objects and code.
- Made practically all of Zope Skinnable
This Week
- Add some code to make skinned files in Zope Core more backward
compatible.
- Clean up last few objects with recalcitrant, inline DTML, and make
then Skinnable.
- Split out all strings to make Zope fully translatable.
<hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%>
State of the PTK, 2000/09/04
In the weeks since our last report, the PTK community has been
quite busy:
* Shane Hathaway landed the proposed "next-generation architecture",
http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/ZWiki/NewPTKArchitecture,
refactoring the "toolkit" as a set of "portal tools", each
providing services to other objects in the portal. The tools
include:
'portal_membership' -- tracks personalization and owned content,
tying them (much more loosely) to the AUTHENTICATED_USER.
'portal_registration' -- implements portal-specific policies for
user
signup, password generation/mailng, etc.
'portal_workflow' -- encapsulates the workflow policies of the
portal
'portal_catalog' -- indexes portal content
'portal_discussions' -- implements portal policies for types of
content which are "discussable", and how they are linked to
their discussion threads.
'portal_actions' -- list context-specific actions for portal
objects.
'portal_undo' -- provide a portal-friendly interface to Zope's
undo
machinery.
Each of these tools is represented as an interface in the 'PTKBase'
product, with a sample implementation (typically preserving the
"old"
policies/semantics) in the 'PTKDemo' or 'DemoPortal' products. The
single most attractive feature of the design is that portal
managers
can replace these tools on a *per-portal basis*.
* Fabio Forno provided invaluable aid in debugging the new tools.
* One noticeable result of the new architecture is the "renaming of
the toolbox",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001341.html
to the "actions list", in order to avoid confusion with the
"portal
tools."
* Bill Anderson "released a new version",
http://www.zope.org/Members/Bill/News/MembershipRelease-075
of the Membership product, upgrading it to "beta" status. This
product uses ZPatterns to manage member registration and logins,
and is on a trajectory for eventual reintegration with the
new PTK Architecture.
* Chris Withers announced "Swishdot",
http://www.squishdot.org/968089230/index_html, a successor to
the popular Squishdot weblog product, to be built around the
PTK.
* Tres Seaver "proposed",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001430.html
revamping the implementation of the Dublin Core metadata
within the PTK, in order to bring it closer into line with
the intent of the "spec":http://purl.org/DC.
* A "long thread",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001461.html
on "hooking" various portal actions resulted in a "proposal",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001493.html
to create an "event channel" object, 'portal_events', as another
tool.
PTK Tracker Vitals, 2000/09/04 (since 2000/07/25)
Here is is the current state of the tracker::
Type / Status New Closed Current
Bug Reports 5 3 26
Feature/Doc
Requests 0 0 14
<hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%>
Zope Web
-- by Ethan Fremen
ZEO Bakes in Zope.org Oven
ZEO is being cooked with Zope.org. This has unfortunately
endengered some downtime, as ZEO bugs step out from hiding.
The bonus is that Zope.org should be much more stable when
this is done, and ZEO users get the benifit of a ZEO that's
been put through it's paces.
The Caching Machine
Zope.org now has its images and files cached by Apache
and any downstream cache that cares to do so. This should
result in a much faster apparent speed for Zope.org,
though we can expect that raw hit-count (as measured by
Apache) may decline. Stay tuned for the How-To.
Go Forth and Multiply
Zope.org is going to be getting a new ZEO client on a
geographically remote machine. Once this is tested and
solid, Zope.org mirroring will expand to several clients
in strategic spots throughout the globe. Watch
this space for more details.
Distributed Decision Making
As a necessary precursor stage for a more active involvement
of the community, messages to webmaster@zope.org and issues
posted in the "zope.org Tracker",
http://www.zope.org/Tracker
will be sent to the zope web mailing list.
Hope to see you there!
-EOT-