[ZWeb] NZO progress update

[Guido van Rossum]

A quick update on the progress with the new zope.org project.  As we
all know, Sidnei da Silva (dreamcatcher) has been contracted by Zope
Corp to finish zope.org's transition to a more recent version of Zope
and CMF.  I've recently spent two hours with Sidnei on IRC reviewing
his work.

The work is moving along nicely; we're hoping to open an alpha for
public inspection around February 13.  (Earlier dates have been
floated, but Sidnei's going to be in France from January 31 through
February 11.)

The Wiki conversion is mostly done.  There are some UI issues but
apart from that, NZO has functioning wikis using the CMF-port of ZWiki
done by Simon Michael.  (Simon has been very helpful.)

Other pieces that are close to done: there's a new "Case Study"
template, a new "Zope Service Provider" template, and a new CMFProduct
object (used for software releases).  One issue with the ZSP template
is that in current zope.org, the data is maintained as a giant XML
file; Sidnei could use some help with that.

Sidnei showed me two skins: one Plone-based skin and one pure
CMF-based skin.  Both are unfinished, and beyond repeating that it's
up to the community to pick the skin, I'm not going to take sides. :-)

There are known problems with a small number of objects (550 out of a
total of 150,000!).  One nasty category is trackers; converting the
old trackers to CMF collectors is apparently not so easy, and he could
use some help (correct me if I'm wrong, Sidnei!).  Another, surprising,
category is user folders.  Who'd have thunk there'd be scores of empty
user folders spread all over the place, as well as a bunch of
non-empty ones.  We've decided to toss the empty ones; the community
may need to help with the others.  If you understand why anybody would
have a user folder, now would be a good time to speak up!

The Zope Corp user folder extension product won't be ready in time;
Sidnei is free to pick something else.  Send your recommendations
here.

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