Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 10:50:10 -0600
From: ethan mindlace fremen mindlace@digicool.com
To: editors@linuxtoday.com
Subject: Zope Weekly News for June 7th
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:
- Jeff Rush contributed several patches from his RPM
distribution. - Chris Withers gets the bug-writer-o-the-week award :^)
- 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”, 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