[Zope] Zope News Jan 27 2002
george donnelly
george@zettai.net
Mon, 27 Jan 2003 22:47:04 -0500
ZOPE NEWS January 27, 2002
1. DECISION TIME ON NEW ZOPE.ORG
NZO is moving along thanks to the efforts of Guido, Sidnei, Jeff and
others but the Zope Community has an important role to play. Should
Plone be used? or the CMF? What content should be carried over to NZO
and who's going to help out with this?
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Guido van Rossum's Latest Update on NZO
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http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-web/2003-January/002310.html
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An Open Letter Advocating the use of Plone for NZO
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http://plone.org/Members/zwark/plone-nzo
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An open discussion on how to organize a community voting process for th=
e
NZO decision
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http://plone.org/Members/slinkp/CMF_Wiki.2003-01-25.3013/CommunityDecisionP=
r
ocess
2. CMF 1.4: HELP WANTED
Andy McKay is looking for help with the CMF 1.4 release.
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http://cmf.zope.org/projmgmt/project_schedule/roadmap_1_4
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The relevent discussions on the CMF list:
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http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2003-January/thread.html#16893
3. ZOPE 3 SPRINTS
December saw two Zope 3 sprints in Europe. The first, organized
by Kit Blake at Infrae, brought together a large group of
sprinters for a wonderful week-long session. Much was
accomplished, not just in committed code, but in brainstorming and
knowledge sharing. Rotterdam was a blast and Kit really did an
exceptional job at running the circus.
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http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/InfraeSpri=
n
tathon
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http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Alpha1Spri=
n
t
4. ZOPE RELEASES
In the last newsletter we discussed Jim's promise to get a Zope 3
alpha1 release out in 2002. Well, in most timezones, Jim met his
promise! On Dec 31, Zope 3 officially saw its first light of day.
The release had its intended impact: focus was brought to the
project and the schedule.
Quietly another release began to make its way out. Zope 2.6.1
beta1 was released, with fixes for some problems in 2.6.0.
Another beta was scheduled for December, but that slipped. The
second beta is planned for January, though no announcement has
been made.
5. PLONE 1.0 RC2, FINAL IN SIGHT
A second release candidate for Plone was released Jan 22. The
number of translations is now up to 24! Also, if you want Plone to
look different than the Norwegian Blue layout, RC2 has 8 new
skins.
http://plone.org/Members/runyaga/news/RC2_released
6. UPCOMING EVENTS
SolutionLinux 2003
The Zope Europe Association has organized a pavilion of Zope
companies and organizations for SolutionsLinux 2003, Paris, Feb
4-6. Participants include Ingeniweb, PilotSystems, Logilab,
Cocof, Zope and Python Job Mart, University of Savoie, and
Zopera. In conjunction with the pavilion, there is a second
Zope 3 UI Sprint in Paris during the same week.
http://www.zope-europe.org/sl2003/
Berne Plone Sprint
The week after the Zope pavilion, there is a Plone sprint in
Berne, Switzerland (Feb 10-12). Bernhard B=FChlmann is
organizing it, and he has an impressive list of attendees. And
yes, Berne is gorgeous.
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http://plone.org/Members/buehlmann/PloneSprintBerne/News_Item.2002-12-06.05=
4
9
DZUG meeting and sprint
Christian Theune, Maik Jablonski, and the other DZUG'ers are
planning a DZUG meeting Mar 24-27. Along with the meeting, a
sprint is planned. Looks like Tres Seaver from ZC will be
there as well.
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http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/DZUGSprint
7. ZOPE 3 NEWSLETTER NO. 6
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Zope3News=
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etter6
8. DISCUSSION ON IMPROVEMENTS TO ZPT
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If you've used Page Templates and the associated TAL functions,
you've probably enjoyed the enhanced usefulness and flexibility they
offer. Nevertheless, there is always room for improvement. Order
of TAL operations(1) has been the topic du jour on the ZPT mailing
list(2).
Shane Hathaway introduced his "Mini proposal"(3) to improve TAL by
adding two new attributes: tal:repeat-define and
tal:repeat-condition. At issue is the fact that due to the order of
operations, a tal:define or tal:condition will only be executed once
when on the same element as a tal:repeat. Shane's proposal adds two
attributes that would be evaluated for each repetition.
Well, what looked like a fairly straight-forward request generated a
storm of comments. The reactions ranged from moderate approval (4)
(5) to proposals to change the order of operations and not add tags
(6) to proposals of a user-defined order (7). With all the talk of
changing things, the "leave well enough alone" crowd came out to
play (8). At our deadline, the discussion looks to have stalled
with no resolution.
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1)=20
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/current/AppendixC.stx#3-16
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2) http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zpt
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3) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004210.html
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4) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004248.html
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5) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004249.html
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6) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004241.html
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7) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004226.html
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8) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004244.html
9. ZOPE SOLUTIONS PROVIDERS LIST REACHES 100
As of this weekend, with the addition of TEKK <http://tekk.dk/> from
Copenhagen Denmark and Uptime Systeml=F6sungen GmbH
<http://www.uptime.at/> from Vienna Austria, the Zope Solution
Providers list now has 100 members.
10. CMF Portlets Reaches 0.5.1
I'm working on the next release of CMFPortlets, v 0.5.1, and the
major new feature will be the interactive layout, thanks to
OptionChooser 1.0, a DHTML layers switcher and chooser based on
the Dynapi library, which I got to know by means of Tim Lynch,
member of our community. OptionChooser is written by Dan George.
CMFPortlets 0.5.1 will be released during the next week. An
installer for Plone will be delayed until the release of its 1.0
version, due to remaining issues related to the behaviour of
SkinnedFolders, which are the primitives for portlets.
ZN: Ausum, can you give a sketch of what CMFPortlets does and what
some possible, easy-to-grok applications could be?
AS: Hi George, what a nice opportunity to write stuff.
CMFPortlets was born from the need to offer personalized content
to members, in the same way as many "my.something.com" portals,
without paying the price of getting through any other processor in
the middle. (No XML is needed here.)
The key idea behind was to pack content into renderable container
objects -the portlets, which rely on SkinnedFolders- so that they
could use Zope's security and cataloguing machinery, while been
able to be easily arranged in a presentation page. So, although
portlets are indeed objects with a view method, we don't want nor
need to watch them individually, but through a single global
method, 'page_view', wich is callable from everywhere (from the
root, by default).
A portlet needs to be fully renderable before it gets its way to
the presentation page, (aka 'workspace'). If the portlet uses CSS,
it needs to contain its own styles, so that they don't disturb
another portlet's look in the same workspace. (I'm working on a
'plugable' stylesheet concept so that the designer can define a
general stylesheet for the site, and still allow portlets to look
the way their authors wanted.). As portlets are containers, they
can store anything from other portal types to just code, so that,
if we store several documents, we'll see them rendered one below
another; and if we store one or more methods calling things from
different places, we'll see what those methods retrieve, one thing
below the previous. A portlet's default view does render and show
all what's inside it, but as it needs to provide itslef a
graphical container to show off at the workspace, you can apply to
it a "portlet_skin". (Typically boxes with a title.)
Adding, renaming, deleting and setting the size properties of
workspaces.
Workspaces (or pages) aren't objects by themselves. Instead,
'page_view' is aimed to give you that impression, by rendering the
portlets you have selected (which in their turn are a search to
the catalog) in the place in page you've also selected, according
to a variable living in portal_memberdata. Every time you add,
delete, or rename a workspace, or change its size properties or
add/delete a portlet, you retrieve and modify that variable, just
that. The methods for the task live in 'portlets_garage'.
Applications for portlets
In its origin, portlets were meant just to provide content
personalization for large B2C portals. I use it in combination
with RDFSummary to display feeds in my local computer (which I
used as demo for a few weeks), but in the corporate and intranet
market, they can be used to allow an employee to have its own
workspaces according to his role within the company. This same
level of content discrimination on a personal basis is a must in
large institutions like universities and even the government.
There might be cases when the portlets selection is up to the end
user, and there might be others where a person with the right role
creates the workspaces and assigns them to the users. But the most
important, from my perspective, is that it can be hooked to a
personalization tool ('portal_personalization' maybe) that tracks
a user's session and, based on a computer generated profile and
his own needs, offers him a unique visit experience, all on the
fly.
I'm sorry I can't tell more within the context of this
"impromptu". I hope I have covered at least some of your
questions. I'll write a detailed how-to that you could quote for
the next-to-tomorrow's release of Zope news. :)
11. NEW HOWTO'S
zSSL SSL Server integrated to Zope
http://www.zope.org/Members/nakagami/zSSL
Upload, Insert and Retrieval of BLOBs
http://www.zope.org/Members/murphy/MySQL-BLOBs
How-To install Silva_0.9 on OSX
http://www.zope.org/Members/rmoser/osx_silva
Row level lock with ZMySQLDA on InnoDB causes error
http://www.zope.org/Members/murphy/ZMySQLDA-locking
Formulator_With_ZPT
http://www.zope.org/Members/beno/HowTo/Formulator_With_ZPT
Zope and SSL=20
http://www.zope.org/Members/Ioan/ZopeSSL
Using Dreamweaver with Zope, over WebDAV
http://www.zope.org/Members/ike/dreamweaver/DAV
Zope and Python on Mac OS X v. 10.1 and higher
http://www.zope.org/Members/jens/docs/zope_osx
Tips for multilingual websites, using DTML and Localizer
http://www.zope.org/Members/CodeSyntax/DTML_Localizer
Using Folders as Pages
http://www.zope.org/Members/phill/FoldersAsPages
Issue with importing all from MySQLdb
http://www.zope.org/Members/murphy/MySQLdb-import
Build a simple ZClass (CatalogAware, non-default Catalog, Folderish)
http://www.zope.org/Members/kedai/BuildSimpleZClass
12. PRODUCT RELEASES
ZPhotoSlides 0.9
http://www.zope.org/Members/p3b/ZPhotoSlides/ZPhotoSlides-0.9.tar.gz
Play Chess=20
http://www.zope.org/Members/blacktav/chess/play_chess-0.0.zexp
Silva-0.9.tgz=20
http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/Silva/Silva-0.9.tgz
RemoteUserFolder-0.4
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http://www.zope.org/Members/djay/RemoteUserFolder/RemoteUserFolder-0.4.zip
Zope Discussion Board
http://www.zope.org/Members/rfrey74/zboard/ZopeBoard.zip
PythonDB.zip=20
http://www.zope.org/Members/rfrey74/pythonDB/PythonDB.zip
IssueTrackers general masscontainer
http://www.zope.org/Members/peterbe/IssueTrackerProduct/issuetrackers.zexp
Unified HTML Document
http://www.zope.org/Members/lheber/software/UnifiedHtmlDocument.tar.gz
Silva-0.9.0.1=20
http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/Silva/Silva-0.9.0.1.tgz
Gnowsys version 0.2 (development)
http://www.zope.org/Members/nagarjuna/GNOWSYS/Gnowsys-0.2.tgz
Formulator-1.3.1
http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/Formulator/Formulator-1.3.1.tgz
ParsedXML-1.3.1
http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/ParsedXML/ParsedXML-1.3.1.tgz
ZWiki-0.14.0
http://www.zope.org/Members/simon/ZWiki/ZWiki-0.14.0.tgz
TextIndexNG-1.08
http://www.zope.org/Members/ajung/TextIndexNG/TextIndexNG-1.08.tar.gz
VarImage 1.0 (alpha)
http://www.zope.org/Members/terry/VarImage/VarImage-1.0a.tgz
XMLWidgets-0.8.4
http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/XMLWidgets/XMLWidgets-0.8.4.tgz
BlogTopic-0.1a
http://www.zope.org/Members/karl/BlogTopic/BlogTopic/BlogTopic-0.1a.tar.g=
z
QuickLinks-0.1.6
http://www.zope.org/Members/peterbe/QuickLinks/QuickLinks-0.1.6.zip
This week's Zope News was brought to you (in a hurry) by: Troy Farrell, Pau=
l
Everitt, Bakhtiar A Hamid, Jeffrey Shell, Ausum Studio and George Donnelly.
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