[ZWeb] Zope.org and New zope.org status

[Guido van Rossum]

Here are Zope Corporation's status reports from zope.org and the "new
zope.org" effort.  We haven't been keeping the community up to date
very frequently regarding our efforts to improve these sites, for
which our apologies.  From now on we'll try to do better.  Apologies
for the cross-posting; please direct followups to zope-web@zope.org.

First the zope.org status report.  The big news here is that we now
have a (part-time) paid webmaster, Jeffrey Shell.  (Some of you may
already have noticed this, but AFAICT it was never officially
announced.)  Jeffrey has calmly and quietly been gardening the
zope.org website, adding a link here, cleaning up a page there.  To
reach Jeffrey, send email to webmaster@zope.org.

Next, the new zope.org effort.  When we last reported on this, we had
hired Sidnei da Silva to convert the old site to a more recent version
of Zope and CMF.  The site will also get a new look (based on the
contest winner (similar to www.zope.ch).  We're glad to report that
Sidnei has been very active, and we expect he'll be ready to go live
with the new site next month, despite having spent three weeks in the
hospital with pneumonia.

Here's a more detailed status report from Sidnei:

   Milestone Three:

   - Update ZWiki to latest version -- This was already
   done before I went to the hospital. Of course ZWiki
   development continued, and I updated it again this
   monday to get all fixes. There is still some work
   regarding UI to be done (converting backlinks, history
   and subscribe pages to ZPT).

   Milestone Four: 

   - Create custom replacements, based on CMFDefault for
   UseCases, ZSP, etc. -- Not done yet.

   - CMFPackage -- Its working and funcional. Still needs
   UI work (integrating a mockup that was done by Olivier
   (?) with the Software Package view).

   Milestone Five:

   - Replace Software Product -> CMFPackage -- Migration
   script is working very nicely with this. Some manual work
   will be required for organizing /Products/Zope, which has
   a folder for each version released plus a folder for each hotfix.

   - Replace Tracker -> CMFCollector -- I feel like we need
   to discuss this one a bit. Reason: there is now a new and
   improved collector, CMFCollectorNG, which was developed
   by Andreas Jung based on CMFCollector. It looks worth
   using and contains great improvements

   - Replace UseCases/ZSP -> Custom CMF-Aware types -- Not
   done yet.

   - Consolidate ZCatalogs -- Based on some preliminar
   tests, I feel that we may need a better approach to
   this. Seems like theres no *big* speed improvement in using
   ZCTextIndex when used together with slower indexes, at
   least with the out of the box CMF search script and
   having *all* the content indexed at
   'portal_catalog'. However, the search results seem to be
   a lot more meaningful. So, this item 'just works', but
   may need optimization.

   Milestone Six

   - UI work. Make a "Useable" skin that will be replaced
   later -- Im working on this right now, specially on
   CMFPackage and CMFBackTalk. I already adapted the
   template to be automagically shared between ZPT and DTML
   skins, and thats a great improvement cause it will allow
   us to reuse a lot of things from the old site without big
   modifications.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)