Welcome to Issue 4! To find out what's coming from ZopeMag this quarter read the "Letter from the Editor".

All articles and product reviews for this issue have been published. Issue 005 will be out this weekend!

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Interviews:   Interview with Lalo Martins by: ZopeMag Staff Few people realize it but Lalo Martins could be considered the father or at least Godfather of Zope Page Templates. Based in Brazil, Lalo has been an active part of the Zope and now Plone community for many years. Articles:   Introduction to Zope 3 (Part II of II) by: Steve Alexander In the second part of his Introduction to Zope 3, Steve talks about the new and improved ZClasses as well as a development example of working with Zope 3.   Working with My Media Manager by: Erik Lange My Media Manager is a set of online tools that enables administrator to logically define sequences in media files on a media server, and to store these "clips" as metadata in a database. These "logical clips" can then be arranged in a desirred order, in one or more "shows". Shows are presented and played back for the end-user on the Internet in a "cinema" - a web-page generated by the system, according to file format specifications, in a desired layout and design, controlled through skins by administrator. This makes it possible for administrator to concentrate on the editing of the stored content, regardless of various streaming media formats internal commands and scripting languages, because the system dynamically generates the necessary scripts, from the logical clip data that administrator defines.   Transactions by example: An Online Registration Desk with Zope and PostgreSQL (Part II of II) by: Samuel Sotillo This article describes how to use PostgreSQL transactions with Zope and Python. A basic online registration desk for a fictitious College is used as a sample application. The whole database design process--from the data model to the functional specification--is briefly described. Sample Zope, Python, and SQL code is shown to illustrate the implementation.   Open Page Templates Open Page Templates by: Lalo Martins Today, ZPT templates can be dynamically translated via the i18n: namespace, ported from the Zope3 implementation of ZPT, fetching the translations from Localizer or PlacelessTranslationService. However, a few weeks before ZPT supported the new namespace, some Plone users were already seeing their sites translated; they were using AltPT, a fork of ZPT based on an independent reimplementation of TAL. AltPT managed to get i18n first due to its extensible nature; some things in ZPT are so hardcoded that adding a new namespace to it took more time for the brave developer that did it, than it took me to write a completely new TAL implementation complete with i18n. Now, many months later, AltTAL and AltPT were renamed to OpenTAL and OpenPT and have many users, interested in a more accessible and maintainable implementation of such a central tool. While ZPT now has i18n, its unicode support is very problematic, when it exists; OpenPT, due to its approachable architecture, has a powerful framework for encoding negotiation, and other interesting features. This article is an overview of how and why OpenTAL/OpenPT were written and how they are different from TAL and ZPT.   Python Scripts by: Nico Grubert This article is about Python Scripts, Zope Scripts that let you control Zope objects and perform other tasks that have often been done in the past by using complex DTML code.   Building a New UI For Zope 3 - Skins for Developers (Part II of III) by: Paul Everitt Got a web browser? Then you can develop in Zope! So goes the promise of through-the-web (TTW) development in Zope. Many devoted users of Zope initially got hooked because of this ability. However, TTW development and management in Zope 2 has issues. In Zope 3, both the component architecture and the new Zope Management Interface (ZMI) are being rethought to support TTW dev. In the first Part (published in Issue 3) we talked about Rotterdam, a new user interface for Zope 3. We toured the new interface, discussed the background, goals, and project. In this part we will discuss the implementation of Rotterdam and walk through a sample project to extend the user interface.

Product Reviews: icoya by: Philip Swann icoya OpenContent is a commercial, Content Management System based on Zope, Plone and CMF. Designed for the publishing of dynamic content-rich websites, also often called ?portals?. Easy Publisher by: Philip Swann Easy Publisher is an application on top of Zope customized for newspaper style web publication. Its target audience are writers and editors, who are very unlikely to write HTML. A major feature is therefore a wysiwyg page editor. Also included is workflow and archive management. The product is well documented for the end user. The original Zope DTML Manual is included in the download but not used in the product documentation. A major question regarding EP is its co-habitation with the Zope installation on which it resides. ZopeTestCase by: Julien Anguenot Zope products development reliability can be strongly improved by using the testing features of Python and its unittest module, included in standard now, and by the testing facilities offered by Zope itself. ZopeTestCase uses both of those facilities and permits developers to focus on tests by making Zope testing as simple as possible. ZopeTestCase has features to support a wide range of test scenarios, from small unit tests to running regression suites against existing ZODBs. It supports testing in INSTANCE_HOME situations and is fully testrunner compatible. CPS by: Julien Anguenot Nuxeo's Collaborative Portal Server (CPS) is a popular Zope based Content Management System.