[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?
   =20
    Guido van Rossum's Latest Update on NZO
   =20
    http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-web/2003-January/002310.html
   =20
    An Open Letter Advocating the use of Plone for NZO
   =20
    http://plone.org/Members/zwark/plone-nzo
     =20
    An open discussion on how to organize a community voting process for th=
e
    NZO decision
       =20
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.
   =20
    http://cmf.zope.org/projmgmt/project_schedule/roadmap_1_4
   =20
    The relevent discussions on the CMF list:
   =20
    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.
       =20
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/InfraeSpri=
n
tathon
               =20
       =20
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.
     =20
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.

       =20
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/DZUGSprint


7. ZOPE 3 NEWSLETTER NO. 6

 http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Zope3News=
l
etter6



8. DISCUSSION ON IMPROVEMENTS TO ZPT
   =20
    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.

   =20
    1)=20
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/current/AppendixC.stx#3-16
   =20
    2) http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zpt
   =20
    3) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004210.html
   =20
    4) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004248.html
   =20
    5) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004249.html
   =20
    6) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004241.html
   =20
    7) http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zpt/2003-January/004226.html
   =20
    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
   =20
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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