[Zope-Annce] July 1st Zope Weekly News
ethan mindlace fremen
mindlace@digicool.com
Sun, 01 Jul 2001 21:55:00 -0400
EuroZope barbecue coming soon, how to sell Zope to management
types, Zope 2.4 beta 2 released, and CMF news and discussion
in this week's ZWN
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.
If you or your company are doing something cool with zope,
"submit it to Zope Weekly News",
mail:zope-web@zope.org
for possible inclusion.
----
Upcoming Events
EuroZope Conference
The EuroZope crew is organizing a two
day Zope only conference in Berlin on the 12th
and 13th of July.
The full "schedule is availiable",
http://www.beehive.de/zope/Events/EuroZopeConf.html
featuring exiting topics, including Squishdot, Zope Components,
Internationalization, SmartObjects, and more!
----
Get Zope T-shirts!
Ever have a hankering for a giant blue orb on your back?
Well, now you can satisfy your craving. Score some
"Zope Shirts":http://www.zope.org/Resources/Store and you'll be set.
----
Selling Zope
There was an extensive discussion on how to sell Zope/OSS to management
vs.
proprietary packages.
Chris McDonough framed the problem well:
"Think of a high-level executive making a decision about buying a content
management system like a foreigner on a business trip in a strange
land. Everyone is bugging him to eat at their restaurant. He
recognizes none of the names of these restaurants, and doesn't really
even understand what kind of food each restaurant is selling. But then
he sees the McDonald's "golden arches" (MS/IBM).. and he knows that. He
knows McDonalds isn't the best food, but it's a safe bet in a foreign
country when all he wants to do is eat and move on."
Charlie Blanchard asked where there were case studies or white papers:
Stephen Goeldi suggested "The Buisness Case for Linux and Open Source
Software",
http://www.e-smith.com/pdfs/business_case.pdf
and Martijn Pieters pointed out that Digital Creations has "several pdf
files",
http://www.digicool.com/products
talking about various Zope technologies.
Jon Edwards pointed out that this is an area where Zope User's Groups
could
be helpful, in both profiling solutions and putting together brocures.
Jerome Alet suggested a "brand your own brochure" that would let you
download
a marketing pdf branded with your companie's information.
Mike Krohn does a good analysis, saying "it is going to be a long time
before
Zope is seen as less risky than, say, Vignette. [...] So the major
infrastucture for e-commerce in big corporates is not a market that Zope
can make a big impression on directly. Need to slide round the side. [...]
"Risk is less important on many intranet sites. Cost is important.
Nimbleness
is important. Zope could win here. We would have to be careful with the
messages so as not to get cornered in a niche but it could lead to the
big platform implementations, too."
----
Zope News
Zope 2.4 beta 2 has been released. Changes from beta 1:
- Some of the import shenanigans in ZService.py were still
trying to load Python 1.5 versions of support dlls for running
as a service under win32 (meaning you effectively couldn't).
- Collector entries 2342 & 2348 - StructuredTextNG fixes.
Table-detection code used multi-arg appends and failed.
doc_href() method did not pick up on URLs with query strings.
Thanks to "datagrok"
- Collector #2335: older products like GadflyDA that did not
use registerClass() were registered but their visibility
flag has not been set to Global. So these products did not
appear in the ZMI.
- Corrected handling of nested scopes in restricted code.
The compiler did not correctly handle nested variables
used in multiple child scopes.
- added WebDAV workaround for MSIE 6 beta unable to handle accented
characters inside the CDATA section for the object properties
- fixed broken WebDAV support for GoLIVE unable to handle some
object properties placed inside CDATA sections
----
CMF News
by Seb and Jon
This week, there were 195 posts, made by 57 people
(35% of which were posted by 5% of the people).
How to achieve World Domination in 3 Easy Steps
**Step 1 - Interoperability** - There was some
"discussion":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007868.html
about
"interoperability":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/00786
9.html
with other CMSes. Easing the pain of migrating between competing systems
and
the CMF could be a clear winner. However,
"perhaps":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007876.html
a prerequisite of interoperability with
the Big Playaz (Vignette, Broadvision) is a community standard for
managing websites, rather than just content types?
At which point Jon
"whipped
out":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007922.html
his own fledgling CMS, and asked complete strangers to play with it...
rumours
that he is enticing potential collaborators with offers of sweeties and
puppies
are totally unfounded!
**Step 2 - The Intranet/Extranet Market** - Craig wondered how suitable
the CMF
was for corporate extranets. It
"emerged":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007963.html
that several people were using it for this purpose.
The possibility that the CMF is currently more suited to
corporate intranets than CMSs, out of the box, was
"raised":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007980.html
by Seb, and this theme was picked up by Paul Everitt, as a possible market
focus for the CMF (especially for SMEs).
**Step 3 - Friends in High Places** - Straight from the mouth of a
self-confessed
"pooh-bah":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007989.html
-
"there's a big, big future for the CMF."
**Look, it's working already!** - Amidst all the advocacy musings was one
"particularly glowing comment",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007786.html
from cameron::
"This is what Zope was born for, and I salute you"
At my signal, unleash hell!
New products / releases
- "Blark Weblog /
CMFOptions":http://www.zope.org/Members/jeffsasmor/CMFOptions
- "French
CMF":http://www.zope.org/Members/Remi_Houdaille/CMF-1.0-FR.tar.gz
- "CMF Demo Product":http://www.zope.org/Members/adamgdavis/CMFDemo/
Some CMF Sites
- "http://newdaily.lwn.net/":http://newdaily.lwn.net/
- "http://www.netkook.com":http://www.netkook.com
- "http://iwethey.org:8080/forums":http://iwethey.org:8080/forums
(beta discussions based on sql backend)
- "http://bill.noreboots.com":http://bill.noreboots.com
- "http://www.libc.org":http://www.libc.org
- "http://www.immosys.com":http://www.immosys.com
- "http://www.pricom.co.uk":http://www.pricom.co.uk
Odds and Ends
There are some questions still looking for answers - in particular,
"How to grok
Workflow":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007822.html
(a brief answer appeared),
"Gregoire's workflow questions",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007867.html
and how to get Stock Zope Objects into a CMF instance - "lots of
requests",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007903.html,
"Idle
wonderings":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007907.html
about RSS feeds of the mailing list turned into a fullblown discovery of
Ken's
"Stealth
ZOMA":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007971.html.
Thoughts about an "integrated spell checker",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007878.html ;
better living through "rationalised skins",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007824.html ;
"is the Undo UI useable",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007841.html ;
some ideas about "subscription",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007842.html ;
and "how to
handle":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007853.html
"changes in the
codebase":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007860.html
"gracefully":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007874.html.
Remi launched a
"thread":http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007744.html
about translating the CMF. It looks like
there are, or will be, versions underway in French, Spanish and German.
Finally, there was some "discussion about discussions",
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2001-June/007847.html -
Seb and / or Chris will be having to write a new discussion tool soon, so
any more input on this issue would be very welcome.
-EOT-
--
-mindlace-
zopatista community liason