[Zope] Zope 3.1.0 beta 1 released!

[Stephan Richter]

Hello everyone,

The Zope 3 development team is proud to announce Zope 3.1.0 beta 1.

Zope 3 is the next major Zope release and has been written from scratch based
on the latest software design patterns and the experiences of Zope 2.

It is in our opinion that Zope 3.1 is more than ready for production use,
which is why we decided to drop the 'X' for experimental from the name. We
will also continue to work on making the transition between Zope 2 and Zope 3
as smooth as possible. As a first step, Zope 2.8 includes Zope 3 features in
the form of Five.

Please test this release carefully and send us any feedback! In particular, we
have tried very hard to keep backward-compatibility with the previous X3 3.0
release, so please let us know if the new release breaks your code.


Downloads

  http://zope.org/Products/Zope3/

  Installation instructions for both Windows and Un*x/Linux are now available
  in the top level 'README.txt' file of the distribution. The binary installer
  is recommended for Windows.

  Zope 3.1 requires Python 2.3.5 or 2.4.1 to run. You must also have zlib
  installed on your system.


Most Important Changes Since 3.0

  - New Pluggable Authentication Utility (PAU), which is similar in
    philosophy to the Zope 2 PAS. The following features are available in
    the in the basic PAU facility:

    + Credentials Plugins: Basic HTTP Auth, Session

    + Authenticator Plugins: Principal Folder, Group Folder

    For a detailed description of the pluggable authentication utility,
    see 'zope/app/authentication/README.txt'.

  - Major simplifications to the component architecture:

    + Removal of the concept of a service. All outstanding services were
      converted to utilities: Error Reporting, FSSync, Authentication.

    + Site Managers are global and local now; adapters and utilties are
      directly registered with the site manager. Now global and local
      component registration and lookup behaves very similar.

    + Local registrations can now only have two states: active and
      inactive. This simplified the code so much, that 'zope.app.utility',
      'zope.app.registration' and 'zope.app.site' were all merged into
      'zope.app.component'.

    + Implemented menus as utilities. The API also supports sub-menus now.

    + Implemented views as adapters. Skins and layers are now simply
      interfaces that the request provides.

  - Added an integer-id facility for assigning integer identifiers
    to objects.

  - Added basic catalog and index frameworks.

  - Added "sources", which are like vocabularies except that they
    support very large collections of values that must be
    searched, rather than browsed.

  - Created a new granting UI that allows advanced searching of
    principal sources.

  - Implemented a generic user preferences systsem that was designed to be
    easily used in TALES expressions and via Python code. Preferences can be
    edited via 'http://localhost:8080/++preferences++/'. A demo of the
    preferences can be found at::

      http://svn.zope.org/Zope3/trunk/src/zope/app/demo/skinpref/

  - ZCML now supports conditional directives using the 'zcml:condition'
    attribute. The condition is of the form "verb argument". Two verbs, 'have
    feature' and 'installed module' are currently implemented. Features can be
    declared via the 'meta:provides' directive.

  - Improved API doctool: Code Browser now shows interfaces, text files and
    ZCML files; the new Book Module compiles all available doctext files into
    an organized book; the new Type Module lets you browser all interface
    types and discover interfaces that provide types; views are shown in the
    interface details screen; views and adapters are categorized into
    specific, extended and generic; user preferences allow you to customize
    certain views; 3rd party modules can now be added to the Code Browser.

  - Improved I18n-based number and datetime formatting by integrating 'pytz'
    for timezone support, implementing all missing format characters, and
    reinterpreting the ICU documentation to correctly parse patterns.

  - Added '++debug++' traversal adapter that allows you to turn on
    debugging flags in 'request.debug'. Currently the following flags
    are defined: source, tal, errors.

  - Improved logout support.

  - Added the HTTP request recorder, which lets you inspect raw HTTP requests
    and responses.  It can be used to create functional doctests without
    requiring third-party tools such as TCPWatch.

  - Developed a generic 'browser:form' directive. It is pretty much the
    same as the 'browser:editform' directive, except that the data is
    not stored on some context or adapted context but sent as a dictionary
    to special method (by default).

  For a complete list of changes see the 'CHANGES.txt' file.


Resources

  - "Zope 3 Development Web Site":http://dev.zope.org/Zope3

  - "Zope 3 Dev Mailing List":http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-dev

  - "Zope 3 Users Mailing 
List":http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-users

  - IRC Channel: #zope3-dev at irc.freenode.net


Acknowledgments

  Thanks goes to everyone that contributed.

  Jim Fulton, Fred Drake, Philipp von Weitershausen, Stephan Richter,
  Gustavo Niemeyer, Daniel Nouri, Volker Bachschneider, Roger Ineichen,
  Shane Hathaway, Bjorn Tillenius, Garrett Smith, Marius Gedminas, Stuart
  Bishop, Dominik Huber, Dmitry Vasiliev, Gary Poster, Julien Anguenot

Regards,
Stephan