Zope 2.3.0 alpha 1 released

As promised, Zope 2.3.0 alpha 1 is now available. You can download it from Zope.org:

http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.3.0a1/

This release contains a number of important new usability features, and also marks the first release where a substantial amount of the work done happened in the Fishbowl on dev.zope.org. Some highlights of this release:

Python Scripts are now part of the Zope core. Big whopping kudos to Evan Simpson for all of the work he has put into this! Having Python Scripts in the core will allow people to much more easily separate logic and presentation (and get that logic out of DTML!) More information and prototype documentation for Python Scripts can be found in the dev.zope.org project:

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/PythonMethods

The process of creating an initial user at install time has finally been fixed. Before you had to create a superuser, login as the superuser, create a normal manager, logout, then log back in as the normal manager. This was obtuse and caused big problems for newbies who would log in as the superuser and start trying to work immediately (leading to errors since the superuser cannot own objects).

This process is now much more sane. Now, at install time a default initial manager (not a superuser) is created. The superuser has been renamed to the "emergency user" and is not even created by default. If you ever have a need to log in as the emergency user, you can use zpasswd.py to create it.

The new security assertion support has been checked in. For more information and an updated version of the "Zope security for developers" guide see the project on dev.zope.org:

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DeclarativeSecurity

Added new getId() method to SimpleItem.Item. This should now be used instead of referencing object.id directly, as it is guaranteed to always be a method and to always return the right thing regardless of how the id of the object is stored internally. This relieves DTML writers of the contortions they previously had to go through to handle varying cases of id being a method or an attribute.

Improved Ownership controls. Now you simply choose whether or not to take ownership of sub-objects when taking ownership. Implementation details about whether ownership is implicit or explicit are no longer forced on the user.

Unit testing infrastructure for the Zope core. PyUnit has been checked in, and a utility has been added that will allow us to incrementally begin accumulating (and running) test suites. The new testrunner.py in the utilities directory is a basic utility for running PyUnit based unit tests. It can be used to run all tests found in the Zope tree, all test suites in a given directory or in specific files. The testrunner will be used to ensure that all checked in tests pass before releases are made. For more information, see the docstring of the actual testrunner.py module.

For more information on what is new in this release, see the CHANGES.txt and HISTORY.txt files for the release:

http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.3.0a1/CHANGES.txt

http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.3.0a1/HISTORY.txt

Please note that we do not build binary distributions for alpha releases - the alpha is available as a source release only. When we move into the beta period for 2.3, we will build and distribute binary releases.