[Zope-Annce] February 19th Zope News

[ethan fremen]

The Content Management Framework formerly known as PTK,
Zope 2.3.1 beta is out, Presentation Templates will save us,
Zope.org stabilized,
all in this week's Zope News.


The opinions expressed in Zope 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 Zope News",
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for possible inclusion.

And Now For Something Completely Different:

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Zope Presentation Templates

  -- by Ethan Fremen

  "Zope Presentation Templates",
  http://www.zope.org/Members/tcoram/PresentationTemplates
  now in an alpha release, have the promise of both replacing
  dtml and integrating well with wysiwyg tools, like Adobe
  GoLive.

  I'm really excited about this project: it should go a long
  way towards us being able to have real separation of logic,
  presentation, and data.

  The basic idea is that attributes in a namespace
  will control manipulation of nodes in a native XML namespace:
  the most common example will be XHTML.

  This means that you'll no longer have a page so saturated
  with additional tags that you cannot identify the underlying
  XHTML: instead, you'll have a well formed document that
  your editor can play nicely with.

  A crude example is:

    <p tal:insert="here/saying">Dummy Text</p>

  Assuming the document had a property called "saying",
  with a value of "Hello World", the result would be:

    <p>Hello World</p>

  There are "more examples",
  http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZPT/Examples
  including basic loop constructs.

  After you download and try out the software, please give
  some feedback to the "development project.",
  http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZPT/CurrentStatus

----

Zope Status

  by Brian Lloyd

Summary

  Zope 2.3.1 beta 1 released


Recent News

  This week's not-so-weekly update: Thursday Feb. 15 we released beta 1
  of Zope 2.3.1. 2.3.1 will follow in a week or so barring any problems.

  The 2.3.1 release contains quite a number of bug fixes, both issues
  found during the upgrade cycle to 2.3 and quite a few older issues
  that had been languishing in the Collector. We anticipate that 2.3.1
  will be quite solid, so we will be able to turn some attention to
  other things and start talking about some new longer-term initiatives
  for Zope.

----

The Content Management Framework Formerly Known as the PTK

  --by Ethan Fremen

  The CMF has been on the fast track for the past month or
  so.  Tres reports that we should have a 1.0 release
  by the end of this month.

  You can read all about it at the "CMF dogbowl",
  http://cmf.zope.org
  so today I'll just hilight one of the exciting things
  in the CMF: Access-based filtered searching.

  An article that has just been written but not approved might appear
  in a list of to-be-approved items for an editor. This list
  is generated by a catalog query: however, a regular
  user, searching for articles, will not see the yet-approved
  article.

  Perhaps once this article is published, it is in a members
  only area.  Then, members will see it both in a catalog-driven
  list of content, but also in raw searches, yet it will
  remain invisible to the "Anonymous User".

  I reviewed quite a few indexing engines a while ago. Finding
  one that stayed up-to date with the changes made to the site
  was hard enough (All CMF content is automatically catalogued):
  Finding one that gave a different set of results to different
  kinds of viewers was impossible.

----

Zope Web

  --by Ethan Fremen

  ZopeOrgBlowsUp

    For the past few weeks, Zope.org has been rather unstable.
    I'm pretty confident in the zope software, and so I found this
    rather unnerving.  I put some work into tracking it down, but
    Shane Hathaway really found the culprit, and Ken Manheimer
    finally put it to rest.

    The new wikis had an infinite-recursion loop that was
    causing zope to segfault.  Luckily, this has been corrected,
    and my pager has been silent since (yay!).

  Cluster Grows

    Zope.org's cluster is also getting a bit bigger:
    We're adding a new storage server so that the mail
    can have a machine to itself.  Other benifits of
    the new server will be support for files greater
    than 2GB, so that zope.org will stop coming to a
    writing halt every time the database passes that point.

    We're also adding another ZEO client box to the cluster
    that will allow us to have a place to do things
    (like load in all of the mailing list messages)
    that are a bit ... resource intensive.

  Zope.org grows up

   Since the CMF is nearing release status, it's high time
   that Zope.org starts moving in that direction. We're going
   to be building a new Zope.org off of this one-dot-oh release,
   so stay tuned for a lot of activity next month.

-EOT-