[Zope-CMF] [dev] CMF 1.5 Roadmap, redux

Mon Mar 1 13:53:25 EST 2004

Whoa!  Cool!  Thanks for the summary Tres.

There seem to be many questions/issues wrt Archetypes integration.  So
without some sort of papal edict or some driving force behind the idea
that's better than "it'd be cool", it doesn't seem to make sense to
integrate Archetypes itself into CMF.  I am going to stop my agitation
to see this happen.  It is positive IMHO just to get people from the
different camps involved in the debate talking; hopefully some fruit
will drop out.  I still think Archetypes is beaucoup cool, and I when
possible I am going to use it in my CMF-based projects.  I will likely
use it outside of Plone, so where I can, I will try to eliminate its
dependencies thereon and share the results of that effort with other
people.

But as you suggested it does seem to make sense to integrate some of the
machinery upon which Archetypes/CPSSchema depends (portal_transforms,
perhaps form controller, maybe references, etc.)  In a later release we
could revive thinking about integrating the actual schema bits, be they
Archetypes, or CPSSchema, or Zope 3 schema, some combination thereof, or
whatever.

Small correction:  Archetypes is now BSD-licensed, not GPL-licensed, but
given the consensus, that's a detail that doesn't really matter much.

- C

On Mon, 2004-03-01 at 10:32, Tres Seaver wrote:
> I am summarizing last week's roadmap discussion here.  Please correct 
> any errors / misunderstandings.  If this summary is substantially 
> correct, I will propse a triaged list by Wednesday, with an expected 
> release date near the end of March.
> 
> 
> ========
> Overview
> ========
> 
> The CMF list saw a surprirsing amount of fruitful discussion this week,
> provoked by Yvo Schubbe's reminder that I owed a roadmap for the next
> release of the CMF_.  He wrote:
> 
>    The latest Zope releases look quite good, Zope HEAD seems to become
>    stable again, Plone 2.0 and CPS 3.0 are in release candidate stage
>    and even the sun is shining today. But something is missing: CMF 1.5.
> 
> The current version, `CMF-1.4.2`_, is a relatively small pair of bugfix
> releases following last May's 1.4 release.  Yvo ("yuppie") himself has done
> lots of great cleanup and consolidation work on the HEAD of CVS;  it is
> past time that we think about the scope of work remaining to complete
> another major release.
> 
> This article summarizes my take on the ensuing `roadmap list discussion`_,
> with some attempt to prioritize and triage the suggestions which
> emerged.
> 
> +++++++++
> Proposals
> +++++++++
> 
> ------------------------
> Move Archetypes into CMF
> ------------------------
> 
> Chris McDonough resurfaced a long-standing suggestion that the
> Archetypes_ framework move "down" into the main CMF distribution.
> Discussion of this notion accounted for a large majority of the
> list traffic this week.
> 
> Some of the issues raised were:
> 
> - Archetypes is *big*, enough to make for a weigty testing / integration /
>    documentation burden.
> 
> - Archetypes competes with Zope3_ schemas.  In general, the sense was that
>    Zope3 is still a ways out, and that the Archetypes folks are already
>    planning to move the product toward easy (maybe even seamles) migration
>    to Zope3.
> 
> - Archetypes competes with the CPSSchemas_ product;  those who know the two
>    products better than I note that Archetypes tends to produce "static"
>    schema definitions (per class), while CPSSchemas are more "dynamic"
>    (bound to ``portal_type``).  One fortunate outcome of the discussion 
> has been
>    that the two teams can begin to see ways in which their overlapping
>    products might merge!
> 
> - Archetypes is currently licensed undre the GPL, and must be relicensed to
>    the ZPL before importing it into cvs.zope.org.  The authors have
>    expressed willingness to relicense in the past, so this should not be a
>    blocker.
> 
> - Archetypes depends on Plone's CMFFormController_ tool.  Opinions differed
>    wildly on whether to migrate that tool down.  I don't know enough
>    about it to judge, yet.
> 
> - Archetypes also depends on Plone's PortalTransforms_ tool;  consensus
>    seemed much broader for moving it into CMF (for instance, CPS uses it as
>    well).  Likewise the UID generator tool and the references machinery.  I
>    need to look at all of these more closely: for one thing, we likely have
>    parallel implementations in client software, and I would prefer to be
>    consolidating.
> 
> --------------------------------------------
> Migrate the ``portal_setup`` tool out to CMF
> --------------------------------------------
> 
> There are a number of efforts to ease the process of exporting
> "through-the-web" site configuration (tool settings, for instance); such an
> export would make putting those policy choices under version control
> easier, as well as easing the process of migrating them between sites.
> 
> Alternate solutions include:
> 
> - DCWorkflowDump_
> 
> - ZSyncer_
> 
> -------------------
> Land CMFActionIcons
> -------------------
> 
> As with the ``portal_setup`` tool, the ``portal_actionicons`` tool is a 
> result
> of my long-term project with Boston.com.  In this case, the code is already
> over the wall, added to the public CVS repository in preparation for
> last spring's OSCOM sprint:
> 
>    http://cvs.zope.org/Products/CMFActionIcons/
> 
> At the request of the Plone team, I released CMFActionItems-0.9 in
> October.
> 
>    http://zope.org/Members/tseaver/CMFActionIcons/CMFActionIcons-0.9
> 
> -------------------------------
> Add Epoz-friendly editing skins
> -------------------------------
> 
> Epoz_ is a Zope add-on for exploiting the "in-place" editing facility of
> recent IE and Mozilla.  Allowing content owners to edit their content with
> WYSIAG tools seems a worthwhile goal (structured text is less than popular
> with non-technical CMs).
> 
> Alex Limi pointed out that there are two versions of Epoz, and that the
> older (but more stable) version was hard to extend;  I replied that I
> wasn't planning to do anything complicated with it.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
> Make "classic" DCWorkflow the default workflow
> ----------------------------------------------
> 
> Yuppie has already `checked this in`_.  "Death to DefaultWorkflow!"
> 
> --------------------------------
> Add OrderSupport to PortalFolder
> --------------------------------
> 
> OrderSupport_ was added to the OFS package for Zope 2.7, defining a mix-in
> class, OrderSupport, used to declare containers which allow specifying the
> order of their items explicitly.  The proposal is to extend
> CMFCore.PortalFolder (and therefore, CMFDefault.SkinnedFolder) to include
> this support.
> 
> Which brings up the "meta" question:  which version(s) of Zope will CMF 1.5
> support / require?  If we require 2.7, then this is a trivial exercise
> (skinning what is already wired into the underlying Folder class).  If not,
> then we need to backport OrderSupport, at least for older Zopes.
> 
> ----------------------------------
> Support for Enforcing Vocabularies
> ----------------------------------
> 
> The ``portal_metadata`` tool allows the site manager to express a 
> constraint on
> a metadata field's value by defining a "vocabulary", a set of allowed
> values.  Because when and how to enforce such restrictions is a policy
> decision (in some cases, the policy mighter only be enforced at particular
> times, e.g. at workflow transitions), the "stock" CMFDefault skins don't
> actually ever check the constraint.
> 
> The proposal here is to change that default, so that the metadata
> editing form *always* enforces the constraint, and to fix an underlying
> bug in the tool:
> 
>    http://zope.org/Collectors/CMF/217
> 
> 
> 
> .. _CMF: http://cmf.zope.org
> 
> .. _`CMF-1.4.2`: http://cmf.zope.org/download/CMF-1.4.2
> 
> .. _`roadmap list discussion`: 
> http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2004-February/thread.html#20259
> .. _Archetypes: http://sourceforge.net/projects/archetypes
> 
> .. _Zope3:  http://dev.zope.org/Zope3
> 
> .. _CPSSchemas: http://zope.org/Members/nuxeo/Products/CPSSchemas
> 
> .. _CMFFormController: 
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/collective/CMFFormController/
> 
> .. _PortalTransforms: http://plone.org/Members/syt/PortalTransforms/
> 
> .. _ZSyncer: http://zsyncer.sourceforge.net/
> 
> .. _Epoz: http://zope.org/Members/mjablonski/Epoz
> 
> .. `checked this in`_: 
> http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/cmf-checkins/2004-February/004065.html
> 
> .. _OrderSupport: http://cvs.zope.org/Zope/lib/python/OFS/OrderSupport.py
> 
> .. _DCWorkflowDump: 
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/collective/DCWorkflowDump/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 