[ZWeb] Zope.org - take 3?

[Chris Withers]

Jens Vagelpohl wrote:
> which I understand. The biggest problem that creates is a leadership 
> vacuum and any efforts would soon peter out in a flood of discussions 
> from a whole lot of more or less well-meaning people. It cannot work 
> without a tightly organized *small* group of developers that can work 
> without interference from the community at large. That's how things get 
> done.

OK, I'll bite ;-)

I would be happy to head up this effort, and I'm prepared to commit 1 
day a week for both February and March to working on Zope.org and 
managing the effort of those prepared to help. All I ask in return would 
be authority from someone who can grant it to yes/no things that I'm 
helping with (to avoid endless discussions that go nowhere) and the 
right to produce a case study of the project for my company's website. 
Who's in a positon to say yes or no to these requests?

Anyway, that aside, what I'd propose is:

1. A small, tightly focussed project

2. Keep the look, feel and functionality aimed for to be identical to 
what's there now (hopefully eradicating the myriad of pointless 
ramblings that side tracked the NZO effort)

3. Totally focussed on software, NOT content.

4. Aim at building the site with as simply as possible, using no fancy 
new software, and sticking to the absolute bare minimum to make it work 
fast. If fanciness is needed, let it be in error reporting and site 
logging domain, rather than "cool new features".

5. Have an SVN checkout of the instance home of the storage server and 
each of the app clients (the client would probably be branched off a 
common base, with only the config files being different) so that people 
can checkout the software on a local machine and develop stuff using the 
usual branch-and-merge model.

6. Enable all "system" software (eg: python, zope, cmf) to be easily 
upgraded as needed, so the latest bugfixes can be used as soon as possbible.

7. (maybe) a functional test suite that actually tests all the 
functional aspects we're aiming to support. Does anyone have lots of 
experience producing functional test suites?

Okay, what do people think?

Chris

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