[Zope] Zope Weekly News for June 7th

ethan mindlace fremen mindlace@digicool.com
Wed, 07 Jun 2000 10:50:13 -0600


This week's somewhat abbreviated ZWN includes Zope at
LinuxTag and the Open Source Convention, lots of
documentation progress, including a chat, a new home
for Zope Studio and more!
                 
The opinions expressed in Zope Weekly news are solely the author's,
and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope Community
at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition.

The Zope Weekly News now has a "permanent home",
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN.

And Now For Something Completely Different:

Coming Events

  LinuxTag

    There will be a Zope booth at the "LinuxTag",
    http://www.linuxtag.de
    in Stuttgart, Germany from June 29th to July 2nd.
    In addition to the booth that will be there for the 
    whole conference, there will be 2 rooms available 
    for talks and discussions on the business day, 
    Thursday 29th.

    We are still looking for people who want help 
    organizing the conference, give some talks and 
    attend the booth. Generally, it would also be great
    to know who is planning to be at the conference.
    Please send feedback to "Stephan Richter",
    mailto:srichter@plandepot.com
    See "Zope at Linuxtag",
    http://www.zope.org/Members/Linuxtag/
    for the most up-to-date information.
  
  The Open Source Convention

   This "enormous convention",
   http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon2000/
   hosted by O'reilly, is shaping up to be pretty
   interesting.  Aside from the State of Python,
   given by Guido von Rossum, there's also going
   to be a "talk on the CERT Advisory",
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/w/evening_events.html
   about cross-site scripting, a web-wide security 
   issue that the Zope Community was among the first
   to begin implementing security policies for: they'll
   land with zope 2.2.
   
   Zope is going to be at the conference in force,
   with:
     
     - Paul "opening eyes to the Zope-Mozilla initiative",
       http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e_sess/853
 
     - Ryan telling the world "you can have web
       IMAP and collaboration",
       http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e_sess/725

     - Christopher, as always, concentrating
       on the "edification of the community",
       http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/w/python_tutorials.html

Documentation

   -- by Amos Lattier

 This Week

  * Stephan Richter finished reviewing, fixing, and expanding
  online help content for the Zope management screens.
  We hope to get him set up with CVS and get this checked
  in later this week or next week.

  In addition to brining the help content up to date, he is
  converting it to use Structured-Text. This will make editing
  help pages much easier and will eliminate the two step process
  of editing XML, rendering to HTML and then checking the HTML
  into CVS. This should make life much easier for the Zope team
  when they are documenting their work.

  * Amos released updated "Zope training material",
http://www.zope.org/Members/Amos/TrainingSlidesAnnounce
    that he and Michel Pelletier have been working on for
    the past couple weeks.

  There are twenty slide presentations which cover such topics
  as DTML, application design, and developing Python products.

  Note: the PowerPoint slides are built by a Python script
  that reads Structured Text and talks to PowerPoint over COM - cool.

  * Michel and Amos participated in an IRC chat about
  documentation. A transcript of the chat "is availiable",
  http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Chats
  Thanks to everyone who participated and posed great
  questions. We even got a volunteer commitment out of
  the chat - way to go ZDP folks!

  * Amos is putting together a wiki that details all official Zope
  documentation projects, their schedules and status. Look for an
  announcement before the end of the week.
  We hope that this along with weekly ZWN summaries will give folks
  a much better idea of what were doing on the documentation front.

  * Michel is working on turning his in progress O'Reilly book on Zope
  into a piece of official Zope documentation. If all goes well the
  book will replace the current Guides. We are really excited about
  this and think that if we are successful that this will do a
  tremendous amount for Zope documentation.

 Next Week

  * We plan to complete and make public the Wiki that describes all
  official Zope documentation projects, their schedules and status.

  * We plan to focus on getting docs in shape for Zope 2.2 Specifically
  this means shoring up the help system docs, API docs, and tutorial.
  This all won't get done next week, but hopefully we can make some
  good progress and stay on track to have everything up to date for
  the 2.2 final release.
  If we are really fast we may even sneak a DTML reference into the
  Zope 2.2 final release.

  * Hopefully we will have final word on the status of converting Michel's
  Book into official documentation. That means we can start the process
  of making the Book public and opening it up to community critique and 
  contributions.


Zope Status

  -- by Brian Lloyd

Summary

  o More collector issues resolved, made progress on the 
    todo list for the 2.2 beta.

Last week highlights

  A somewhat shorter list this week since we have changed
  the scheduling of the ZWN :) 12 more collector issues
  were closed and the changes to the ownership model were
  checked in (move and rename operations no longer affect
  ownership, a knob was added to the import screen to allow
  retaining existing ownership on import). The online help
  for ownership and import were updated and expanded as
  well. This week's friends of the core:

    o Jeff Rush contributed several patches from his
      RPM distribution.

    o Chris Withers gets the bug-writer-o-the-week award :^) 

    o Sam Rushing clarified the license for the medusa
      files underlying ZServer. 

Next week

  Finish the outstanding issues for 2.2 beta 1:

    o Some basic hooks to support virtual hosting (a la
      SiteAccess) have been designed and will be added to
      allow product authors to write virtual hosting
      support without fragile dependencies on parts of
      the Zope core.

    o Finish changes to the undo machinery that will expose
      a more appropriate subset of undo-able transactions
      to the user. The set exposed now was fine at one time,
      but as the line between "site management" and "site
      user" continues to blur, a more restricted subset will
      make undo easier to delegate to a broader range of
      users. (I think that this is actually in testing
      now).

    o Get the minimal Observable default implemention
      checked in to the Zope core. Note that for 2.2 at
      least, the only impact of this will be that ZClasses
      will be able to subclass the default Observable
      implementation. While we suspect that many builtin
      Zope objects could benefit from being Observable in
      the longer run, we want to let the interface and
      default implementation shake out in application usage
      before taking that step.

    o Some misc. catalog bugs need to be closed.

  In other news, there is now a "zope-dev wiki",
  http://www.zope.org/Wikis/zope-dev/FrontPage
  where we will begin capturing discussions on future
  Zope development.


Zope Studio

  -- by Martjin Pieters

 - Zope Studio has "a new home", 
   http://www.zope.org/Products/ZopeStudio/.

 - With the new home comes a new and improved front door,
   with better access to the resources. This also includes
   a Tracker!

 - I fixed the Zope Studio install issues. This should be
   in CVS by the time you read this.

Looking ahead

 - More fixes to unbreak Zope Studio against the current
   Mozilla codebase.

 - Start implementation of a object handling component
   architecture, where new object types can be supported
   with installing new Zope Studio components.
  
Zope Web

  -- by Ethan Fremen

  - The Spotlight has been altered in a mostly
    behind-the-scenes fashion, but they should be 
    easier to maintain.

  - The second Zope Chat went over well.  I want
    to do them every week:  Tell me what the
    topics "should be",
    http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Chats/ChatTopics
    If you want to speak, "tell me",
    mailto:mindlace@digicool.com

  - The came_from bug "was squished",
    http://www.zope.org/Tracker/37

  - ZopeNews properly "formats structured text",
    http://www.zope.org/Tracker/39