[Zope-Annce] August 28th Zope Weekly News

ethan mindlace fremen mindlace@digicool.com
Mon, 28 Aug 2000 20:41:55 -0400


The Zope "Weekly" News returns after a long hiatus. Those Zope Weekly
News
items submitted in the past few weeks are included here. The next
issue *will* arrive on September fifth.                        
   
The opinions expressed in Zope Weekly news are solely the authors',
and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope Community
at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition.

You can always get to the most recent Zope Weekly News
with "one convenient URL",
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/current

And Now For Something Completely Different:

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Documentation

  -- by Michel Pelletier

 Week of July 31 - August 4

  The O'Reilly Zope Book (title still to be determined) is moving along
  faster than ever.  Last week saw quite a bit of editorial contribution
  from our new editor at O'Reilly, Laura Lewin.  Final outline
  restructuring is completed, and Chapters one, two and three are moving
  along toward rough draft completion.  This week we'll be posting the
  new outlines, structure, and chapter content.  By next week's ZWN, we
hope
  to have a delivery schedule with O'Reilly and you'll all find out when
  you can get your hands on a copy of the book.

  An interesting little factoid is that Amos and I are authoring the
  book entirely in Structured Text (STX).  Using the new 'STX NG', the
book
  structured text is transformed into a DOM object which is used to
  generate HTML (for the online content), DocBook (for O'Reilly) and PDF
  (for online printing).  STX NG, including its DocBook and PDF
  capabilities, will be released in future versions of Zope once we
  wring all the bugs out of it, for now, it can be found on the
  'StructuredText-Dev' CVS branch.
 
 Week of August 7 - 11

  Last week was super busy for the book.  Amos and I added over 10,000
  words to the book and the Preface, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are all
  fully rough drafted and are in O'Reilly's hands for some technical
  review.  There will no doubt be quite a bit more polish applied
whilewe
  go back and forth with O'Reilly.  As usual, the entire book can be
  seen online "on the Zope site":http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/.

  We need your technical review too.  We understand that it's a bit
  rough to really get into it without the screenshots but take it a few
chunks
  at a time and let us know what you think.  Keep in mind this is *rough
  draft* material.  Please send any comments you have to
  "us",
  mailto:docs@digicool.com

 Week of August 21 - 25

  Amos and I have been quite busy on the book, and chapters 1 through 5
  are online in rough draft form!  Don't let the roughness scare you
off,
  there is *alot* of material up there.

  The Preface and Chapters 1 and 2 have been proofed by O'Reilly and
  they will be getting 3, 4, and 5 on Sept. 8th.  This week, Amos and I
will
  be adding screenshots and illustrations to the first five chapters, as
  well as the continuous process of rereading and rewriting.

  As always, the book can be read online at
 
"http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/":http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/,
  and comments can be sent to "docs@digicool.com",
  mailto:docs@digicool.com.
  

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Zope Status

  -- by Brian Lloyd

Week of July 31 - August 4

 Summary

  Tying up a 2.2.1 release, progress on dev.zope.org projects


 Last week highlights

  18 more Collector issues were closed last week in preparation for a 
  2.2.1 release. Bug-hunting-Zopistas-of-the-week include:

    - Steve Alexander for his patches to DateTime

    - Toby Dickenson who verified a reported parser module problem to 
      be a Python 2.0 bug

    - Aleksander Salwa sent a patch to fix updating of boolean
properties 
      on ZClass property sheets

    - BitDancer for various ZCatalog fixes

    - Adam Karpierz fixed a problem with ZPublisher.Client

  Thanks also to anyone I missed and to those who helped out in
verifying 
  fixes. 

  The new dev.zope.org site continued rolling along last week, with 
  several new proposals being added. FourThought posted their proposal 
  for an XSLT product to compliment the upcoming release of their 
  XMLDocument work. For the Zope core, Jim Fulton proposed a naming 
  convention to be used going forward for new Zope APIs.

  Two proposals became active projects last week. Martijn Pieters' 
  "skinnable objects" project will work to produce an architecture 
  that can support alternate management interfaces so that Zopistas 
  can create localized versions or just experiment without having to 
  hack the Zope core. Evan Simpson's Cache Manager project will 
  introduce a generalized caching framework for Zope objects. 


 This week

  This week we will be making a Zope 2.2.1 release that resolves all of 
  the known issues that have come up in the course of people upgrading 
  to Zope 2.2 final. We'll also start working on architecting the new 
  public CVS to support dev.zope.org. 

  One other thing I'd like to get done this week is to start on the  
  first of what I hope will be fairly regular series of articles for 
  dev.zope.org that will talk more about our open development process. 

Week of August 14 - 18

 Summary

  Tying up a 2.2.1 release, progress on dev.zope.org projects


 Last week highlights

  Lots of Collector issues were closed in the last two weeks. We've 
  been having network problems so few details this week :) We're still 
  working on one last issue and then we'll be ready to make 2.2.1 
  final.

  Dieter Maurer and Adam Karpierz walked away with the award for
prolific 
  patch-submitters of the week :) 

  Several proposals on the dev.zope.org site saw a lot of activity as 
  we try to wrap up initial discussion and turn them into projects. 
  The proposal for improved spelling of security assertions will move 
  ahead soon as I'd like to see this implemented in the next Zope 
  feature release. Work is also proceeding on PythonMethods which I 
  also hope will make the next feature release.

 This week

  This week we will be making a Zope 2.2.1 release and we'll start 
  architecting the new public CVS to support dev.zope.org.

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Zope Studio 

  -- by Martijn Pieters

  Due to other project work, no news this week

"Skinnable And Localizable Objects",

 
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/SkinnableAndLocalizableObjects/
  
  This project will attempt to provide a mechanism for Zope to discover
  and use different skins and locales for disk based DTML files and
  provide Zope Products with localized dictionaries of strings.

  Last week

    - Project set up

    - Initial Use Cases set up and fleshed out

  This week

    - Design architecture

    - Implement

  Although I requested feedback from the Zope Community on this project,
  not many people have actually done so! When implemented, it will be
  much harder to incorporate your ideas, so please read through the
  project documentation and leave your comments on the Discussion page.

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PTK News, PE 2000/08/08

  -- by Tres Seaver

 * New PTK release, 0.8.1/0.8.2.  See the "announcement",
    http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/ZopePTK-0_8_1-release
   Note especially the "changes",
    http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/changes
   and the "install notes",
    http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/install

 * Shane Hathaway is working on a "cool refactoring",
    http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001337.html
   of the functionality currently provided by the portal object.

 * Bill Anderson is proposing a "redesign of membership",
    http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001331.html

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Zope Web

  -- by Ethan Fremen

  Show Stopper Bugs
   
   These have been the weeks of the show-stopper bugs:
   First, a bug that prevented me from copying or pasting
   my ZClass objects (fixed in 2.2.1), then a bug in ZEO
   prohibited me from working in versions (fixed in 0.2.3)
   kept the ZWN from coming out.

  This Week
   
   Zope.org will be opening up a new area for developers that
   wish to contribute to the next version of Zope.org.
   This will include a project at dev.zope.org for renewing
   the products that Zope.org currently uses for it's 
   various content-objects (news items, how-tos, etc)
   and work on some other products (Notably the Topic object.)

   Interested parties may contact "me",
   mailto:mindlace@digicool.com
   or hang out and wait for the proposal.