In this quarter ZopeMag presents the first in an intended series of articles on the out-of-the-box content management application Plone. Due to circumstances beyond our control we were unable to publish the article "Coders in Plone" last quarter. But in the current issue the Zope developer Johnagustine Lim from Hawaii has given us an in-depth description of the conversion of a Website – that of the Governor of Hawaii – to Plone. The article is 18 pages long with lots of screenshots and diagrams to show you step-by-step how to give a Plone site your own look-and-feel.

Paul Everitt, formerly with Zope Corporation, who is the head of Zope Europe, will write the third in his ongoing series of articles on the developing Zope 3. After presenting (in Issue 3) some basics of the new Zope version and the Rotterdam skin (focussed on Zope site-developers) and giving us (in Issue 4) a step-by-step description of how to customize the user interface skin – while making use of elements of Zope 3's basic skin and the Rotterdam skin - in the present issue he goes into more detail on Rotterdam and extending the user interface. In subsequent issues Paul Everitt will continue his introduction to Zope Corporation's attempt to make Zope more user-friendly, to widen its growing circle of users.
We would like to ask those of our readers who followed Paul's description of how to install a new skin in Zope 3 to give us feedback on their success (or failure) at feedback@zopemag.com. These responses will then flow into Paul's new article(s).

Our free article this quarter is on a Zope product, RevisionManager, by its creator Philipp von Weitershausen, a developer from Berlin (currently in Mexico). He provides us insight into the development and use of the application which, based on the Unix standard application CVS (Concurrent Versioning System), enables different users to work simultaneously on a Zope project. This represents a considerable improvement on the rudimentary form of revision control offered by Zope Versions, which, for example, does not allow different users to work simultaneously on the same object.
Note: This is not a product review but an in-depth presentation of this highly useful product.

Milos Prudek, a developer from the Czech Republic, will continue the description he began in Issue 3 of the background for his creation of an advanced community site. In the current article he presents code selections he wrote for solving certain common problems that arise in the development of a community site, for example how to mirror external content while providing permanent access to it. We will be hearing from Milos in further issues as he pursues his description of the solutions for general questions that arose during the creation of this Website.

Our product reviews are on on Epoz, a WYSIWYG editor for DTML objects; and on Volker's Edit, a WYSIWYG editor for ZPTs.

The author of these Product Reviews, Kristoph Kirchner, will also be writing an article for the current issue: an in-depth description of Zope and SOAP. There is very little documentation in the community about this subject, so if you have to build a SOAP-based solution you won't want to miss this article.

By the way, we are always looking for authors of Product Reviews. If you've had good experience with a Zope product and would like to write about it contact the editor (for conditions see the "Write for ZopeMag" page).

With this issue we begin our series of miniGuides, as a service to our readers. If you've been wondering what a "Zope Sprint" is read the short but illuminating description "Zope Sprinting" by Albertas Algejevas from Spain.

Our miniGuides, which will be published at varying intervals, will provide detailed descriptions of single, circumscribed topics.

The SuperGuides, on the other hand, will be comprehensive descriptions of much broader topics.

A big thanks goes out to our subscribers! We are grateful for the many thoughtful comments on how we can improve our publication.

Our interview for this issue is with Chris McDonough, who is both a software developer for Zope Corporation and the person responsible for The Zope Book and Zope Developers Guide. He tells us how he came to Zope and shares his insight that writing good documentation is more difficult than writing code.

Finally, we are offering a special this summer: until August 15th you can get a 1-year introductory subscription (with access to back issues) for 49 Euro instead of 75 Euro!

Don't miss this chance!