Zope

This years Plone conference is now over. It was held in Bristol, UK. BlueDynamics Alliance took part with four partners: Florian Friesdorf (Munich) Peter Holzer (Agitator, Zürich), Jens Klein (Klein & Partner KG, Innsbruck) and Johannes Raggam ... [More] (Graz). First a big thanks to Matt Hamilton and the whole Netsight team and its helpers for organizing this 300-participants, 4-parallel-tracks, perfect-wifi, with-big-party, with-sprint, with-fun event. Beside all conference related: Bristol is a great place to meet with the amazing Plone community. The series of regular talks, lightning talks and open space was well selected. They covered everything from technical to social aspects, addressing beginners up to developers and disseminated new ideas as also created new ones. Most important anyway was again to meet the people, talk, learn and tell. BlueDynamics Alliance have been lucky to give two talks and one lightning gtalk:  Jens Klein talked about Plone semantics and IKS FISE - there will be a separate entry about it later, please be patient. Video, Slides.Florian Friesdorf showed the latest LDAP works using our new, very flexible LDAP stack based on nodes. Video.Lightning talk about bda.plone.finder, a Finder-like navigation for Plone, given by Jens Klein demonstrating the addon written by Robert Niederreiter. Video (starting at 34:40). The open space sessions on friday were very good. The session on plone.app.imaging and how to make it even more flexible was very productive. At the moment Plone supports only image-scaling. Often needed feature is cropping or other image transformations. Major idea is to allow any transformation by using ZCA. Next is to allow chains of transformations. The outcome (will/is) documented is a PLIP. Andreas Zeidler already started to work on it at the sprint. Then Jens invited to an open space on semantics in plone. We agreed to start a special area on plone.org to collect semantic technologies and developments for Plone. Weekend was sprint time. Saturday Jens sprinted on IKS-FISE, Hannes on plone.app.calendaring, Peter on eea.facetednavigation and Florian on bda.ldap and the user and group management. Sunday Peter and Jens sprinted on collective.dynatree - an basic integration and (optional) archetypes widget for the jquery plugin dynatree. Now back at home we all need to sort all the input we got at the conference. Its always worth to travel around and meet in person. [Less]

While many were still recovering from last week's successful Plone Conference 2010 in Bristol, UK, the Plone Foundation kicked off the process of picking the venue for next year's conference by putting out a call for proposals. ... [More] http://plone.org/events/conferences/plone-conference-2011 Proposals are due on January 7th, with the winning venue being announced later that month. Foundation members will have an opportunity to voice their preference on the final selection and we're hoping for a variety of options from which to choose. So if your organization would like to host the global Plone community's most important annual event, please take a look at the call for proposals and let us know your plans.   [Less]

Vincent Pretre is lead developer at Zest Software for http://prettigpersoneel.nl, a hosted service for Human Resource Management for small to medium sized companies. The site uses Products.plonehrm, collective.sendaspdf and: jquery.pyproxy. The idea ... [More] is to replace KSS with jQuery for Ajax requests. Modify the DOM with python. We wanted it to be easy to use on client (browser) and server side. Keep jQuery syntax as close as possible. It should also be as extensible as jQuery, so existing plugins should work. It can be used as jQuery plugin. pyproxy binds a call to an event. There is also pyproxy_call. In python: @jquery defines a view as callable by jquery.pyproxy. JQueryProxy: an object used to modify the DOM. extend_grammar: defines plugins syntax. Current limitations: you cannot do a chained call, cannot save a query, cannot have functions as parameters (so no callbacks). It is stable: used on production for months. Works with Plone and Django (can be extended to other frameworks), works with Firefox, Chrome, IE, WebKit. The product is hosted on github. See the README there. Releases are available on PyPI (0.2 released on 22 October 2010). See the slides. More Dutch But wait, there is more... if you are Dutch! I have a Dutch overview of all the lightning talks and a Dutch summary of all the talks. [Less]

Hey all you Dutch folks out there: on Wednesday there's a Dutch python meeting again. It is dead smack next to Arnhem station, so especially for those who think Amsterdam is too far away: this could be your chance! There's going to be a ... [More] talk about the new goodies in Plone 4. I haven't touched Plone in the last 1.5 year, so I'm looking forward to that presentation. Hudson is all the rage now and we'll be treated to a talk on that by Remco. Remco works where they're really into Hudson, so that's going to be good, too. There aren't many lightning talk slots filled yet. I'll at least show my handy checkoutmanager tool for juggling all your hg/svn/git/bzr checkouts. So if you've got a small (or big) pet project: by all means tell us about it! [Less]

Carlos has been busy polishing up for release the 3rd chapter. As I understand this is the last of the introduction to ZODB. Now the next chapters are more detailed about theory and implementation of ZODB. Explanation of MVCC, transactions, etc. ... [More] You can see the latest sphinx documentation at http://www.zodb.org/zodbbook/. Another killer feature of the sphinx documentation is that Disqus has now been integrated into the HTML rendering of the pages. You can comment on each of the pages directly. Very cool. You can also see the magic which enables Disqus/Sphinx integration on github. http://github.com/cguardia/ZODB-Documentation/blob/master/book/_templates/page.html I have not seen Disqus being used with sphinx. But I hope it catches on. Thanks to Carlos and Jens for making the ZODB book building daily on zodb.org and enabling disqus on the pages. The bar for participating is very low -- please participate. Add a comment. Even if you like it. We need to hear more peoples thoughts. [Less]

The draft for chapter three of the ZODB book is now in the github repository. There is now enough material that we felt ready to put it up somewhere for easy reading and possibly a bit of discussion. Jens Vagelpohl helped me get it up on the zodb.org ... [More] web site and I added Disqus comments to the text. We'd very much appreciate any feedback on the work so far. [Less]

On Friday, October 29, a new board of directors for the Plone Foundation was elected by the membership. The Plone Foundation board for 2010-2011 will include: Geir BækholtSteve McMahonMatt HamiltonJon StahlAlexander LimiCalvin Hendryx-ParkerMark ... [More] Corum The board will elect officers at its first regular meeting and is expected to name advisory members for the next term shortly. Thanks to all those who stood for election, and to Hanno Schlichting for once again serving as the "Foundation Election Master!"   [Less]

Hi, The Grok development team is happy to announce the Grok - also know as the Grok Toolkit - 1.2 release! This release took a huge effort from the Grok development team to reduce the number of (legacy) dependencies, most importantly removing a ... [More] very large number of zope.app.* packages from the stack! This results in a smaller and more manageable footprint. The Grok (Toolkit) 1.2 uses zc.buildout-1.5.2 and the new features it brings. Most importantly, the possibility to safely use the system Python for creating new projects. This should especially help newcomers who want to try out Grok. We can simplify the installation instructions by leaving out the "virtualenv" steps. The Grok (Toolkit) 1.2 is based on the Zope Toolkit 1.0 release! The Grok (Toolkit) does diverge a little from the ZTK 1.0 for a couple of its dependencies. These are listed separately in the Grok Toolkit versions file that can be found here: http://grok.zope.org/releaseinfo/1.2/versions.cfg The list of changes can be found here: [Less]

Grok 1.2 is a feature release of Grok based on the Zope Toolkit 1.0, zc.buildout-1.5.2. A very large number of zope.app.* dependencies have been removed to have a smaller, more manageable footprint. This release took a huge effort from the Grok ... [More] development team to reduce the number of (legacy) dependencies, most importantly removing a very large number of zope.app.* packages from the stack! This results in a smaller and more manageable footprint. The Grok (Toolkit) 1.2 uses zc.buildout-1.5.2 and the new features it brings. Most importantly, the possibility to safely use the system Python for creating new projects. This should especially help newcomers who want to try out Grok. We can simplify the installation instructions by leaving out the "virtualenv" steps. The Grok (Toolkit) 1.2 is based on the Zope Toolkit 1.0 release! The Grok (Toolkit) does diverge a little from the ZTK 1.0 for a couple of its dependencies. These are listed separately in the Grok Toolkit versions file that can be found here: http://grok.zope.org/releaseinfo/1.2/versions.cfg The list of changes can be found here: http://grok.zope.org/doc/1.2.1/changes.html To upgrade existing project you might find the upgrade notes helpful, to be found here: http://grok.zope.org/doc/1.2.1/upgrade.html The 1.2 release will __not__ bring two still long awaited changes: Support for the latest martian version. The improved template registry merge. They will have to wait for the 1.3 release. Another important note: Because of the update to zc.buildout-1.5.2 and other structural changes, the new grokproject version will not be able to install projects for Grok < 1.2. We realize this release will bring quite some structural changes that might affect your projects in some way. Please let us know when you run into problems upgrading your projects on the grok-dev mailinglist or on the #grok IRC channel. We will try to help and it will also help us, the Grok developers, by fixing bugs and other issues. [Less]

Last week we (Nelen & Schuurmans' IT department) went to a conference center in Doorn for a two-day team course with our regular trainer Chris Bos. The goal: improving our work as a team. Best way to start such a course day: cycling! ... [More] Doorn is some 30km from my home, so I took my bike for a nice early morning trip. The course itself? A lot of time was allocated to talking with each other. Getting to know each other better. Getting to know each other's opinions. Team? Yes, that means a so-called Belbin team roles test (wikipedia explanation). I personally like that test as it already helped me to get to know myself better (I've done the test a couple of times over the years). I've got an entry in my weblog that explains my own Belbin roles. We didn't dive into the test results right away, but took 1.5 hour to do one-on-one talks. One person would guess the other's roles and explain "why" to him in 10 minutes. Then the other way around. We did four rounds. I gained a lot of useful input that way! After that we got everyone's test results. We got some time to go through our own results and the input we got during the one-on-one talks to come up with the two top roles we normally perform. After that we dived into everyone's results and gave a lot of feedback. Useful! We did more, of course, like a one-hour explanation by Bastiaan, our "boss", about his idea for arranging the work in our department. And we got to give each other feedback on small irritations or weirdnesses. And a card-based exercise for figuring out what every one of us thinks is important when working together as a team. The main effect of the course? We know each other more. And I think the Belbin team roles will help us to split up the workload better. We've at least put up the Belbin results on our big central whiteboard :-) [Less]