The good news I want to announce is that the buildout-based Plone Installers for Windows have been updated, and a few bugs have been fixed in the process. Namely:

1. Running ‘bin\buildout.exe’ would not show any output. That was because it was generated by running ‘bootstrap.py’ with ‘pythonw.exe’, so that a command prompt would not flash on the screen. I added an extra step at the end that re-runs ‘bootstrap.py’ with ‘python.exe’. So a command prompt will flash quickly, but at least it works right.

2. The version of ‘setuptools’ being shipped in the buildout installer was still ‘0.6c8’, which did not work with Subversion 1.5. At least one person was affected right away by this, and I only found about it because I was watching the #plone channel closely.

To fix those problems I had to make two extra releases, because they came to my knowledge after the release was already uploaded. So if you downloaded an early build of the Plone 3.1.6 buildout-based Installer for Windows, go and fetch the latest build. Otherwise, if you are willing to play with Plone 3.2.0a1, go and fetch that instead.

Thanks to everyone that contributed to this release!

I’ve been a member of the Plone community since the start. Still remember the Plone 1.0 release, when I was at SolutionsLinux 2003 in Paris with Paul Everitt, Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan. There was quite some excitement going on at the time around the release, just because 1.0 is such an important release on the lifecycle of a product.

It’s just great to be here 4 years later and feel the same excitement, with such a great community now behind the Plone brand.

More importantly, it’s great to see that Plone has attracted so many great new developers, without whom this release would not be possible. Plone really stands out from many other Open Source projects for it’s great ability of attracting smart and interesting people. I’m really proud to be a part of this community.

Congratulations, Plone!

We recommend you download this update and run it on your server as
soon as possible.

The update adds a product named “Hotfix_20070320″ to the Enfold Server
“Products” directory. After running the installer, you must restart Enfold
Server for the patch to take effect.

This security vulnerability involves the Zope application server, one of
the key components underlying Enfold Server. More details are on the
Zope community Web site.

Enfold Systems News

Spring 2007

In this issue:

• Server 3 improves Windows intranets, extranets
• Proxy 3 squeezes better performance from servers
• Desktop 3 saves clicks, time … and now money
• New team member to benefit clients’ projects

Server 3 improves Windows intranets, extranets

Enfold Server 3 is production-ready, with a variety of
improvements to make intranets and extranets on Windows servers
faster, more stable and more flexible:

• An upgrade of Plone to Version 2.5, targeted at the
  authentication and scalability requirements of large and
  mid-sized organizations
• More than 30 fixes to create even better integration with
  Microsoft’s Active Directory
• A new FileTemplate feature for creating common documents
  quickly
• Ability to integrate your content management system with
  just about any relational database using Open Database
  Connectivity (ODBC)

Get details and a free 30-day trial.

Proxy 3 squeezes better performance from servers

The just-released Enfold Proxy 3 is the fast, easy, affordable way
to speed up Plone and many other Web applications running on
Windows. It includes powerful new features to help users squeeze
better performance from existing Web application servers:

• Request distribution across multiple application servers for
  scalability and increased uptime
• Wildcards for flexible purging of cached resources

Proxy 3 also includes dozens of minor improvements over Version 2.

Get details and a free 30-day trial.

Desktop 3 saves clicks, time … and now money

A new price structure lets buyers save 50 percent or more off
previous prices of Enfold Desktop 3, the application that saves
clicks and time for content authors and editors.

Enfold Desktop 3 is still free for use on up to five computers,
and now licenses for each additional five computers are available
for $125.

Get details and download the free version.

New team member to benefit clients’ projects

Organizations with advanced intranet and extranet needs can expect
to see even better on-time and on-budget performance with Enfold
Systems’ new director of professional services.

Arthur Chong recently joined Enfold. With 17 years in the software
industry, Arthur has extensive management and technical experience
delivering successful projects for a variety of organizations.

Enfold developers continually create and refine new Plone add-on
products, and they draw on this ever-growing library to deliver
clients’ projects more efficiently. If you’re considering a
project that will empower your team to collaborate on content for
a high-performance Web site, intranet or extranet, please e-mail
sales at enfoldsystems dot com to set up a call to discuss your needs.

Update: Stefan Behnel has just released lxml 1.3beta and lxml 1.2.1. Installers for Windows, for Python 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5 have been uploaded.

Yesterday I had a small problem with the Python module ‘tarfile’ not being able to unpack some of the eggs that are now part of Plone. So what I did was to change the tarfile module to skip over those files, which end up being some Mac resource forks or whatever those are called these days. Those fancy files whose the filename starts with ‘._’.

And if you missed the post yesterday, or it turned up garbled, Enfold Systems has released beta versions of two of its main products yesterday, Enfold Server 3.0 Beta 2 (data sheet, download) and Enfold Proxy 3.0 Beta (data sheet, download). For more information check out the official announcement.

Enfold Server 3.0 Beta 2 ships with Zope 2.9.6, Python 2.4.4 and Plone 2.5.2. Both products have been through a long testing cycle, and still have a few days in its beta cycle ahead, before hitting a final release. We are already using those products in production, but recommend you to test them on a separate environment, or keep a backup handy.

We do take your feedback seriously. So try out those betas, and report your good (or bad) experiences in our support section, or even by leaving a comment on this post. We do appreciate. Help us make the experience of using Plone on Windows even better!

Worth noting is the fact that we do not require user registration anymore for downloads. That’s right. You can now download a fully functional, 30 day trial version of Enfold Server and Enfold Proxy straight from our website. No form-filling. No complexity. Just click the link and be done with it.

There are more exciting news coming out from Enfold in the next couple days. Stay tuned!

Remember, Enfold Server is the best way to deploy Plone on Windows. With built-in Active Directory, Single Sign-On through NTLM and IFilter integration, it provides an amazing out-of-the-box experience that integrates straight to the heart of your intranet.

Enfold Proxy is our generic caching solution with built-in load-balancing that ties into IIS. And it’s not Zope-specific! We’ve been using it successfully with several third-party applications, from Vignette to TurboGears.

And if your interested in desktop integration, check out Enfold Desktop 3.0 (data sheet, download), our extension to Windows Explorer that puts your documents just a drag-and-drop away from your website.

tarobj._extract_member(member,dst) # XXX Ugh
File "C:\src\ees\build\community\3.0.0\external-Python-2.4-source\lib\tarfile.py", line 1440, in _extract_member
self.utime(tarinfo, targetpath)
File "C:\src\ees\build\community\3.0.0\external-Python-2.4-source\lib\tarfile.py", line 1572, in utime
raise ExtractError, "could not change modification time"
tarfile.ExtractError: could not change modification time

That # XXX Ugh right there certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence. Who knows what the author meant.

In the meantime, while we sort out that issue, I want to share some exciting news with you. Enfold Systems has released beta versions of two of its main products yesterday, Enfold Server 3.0 Beta 2 (data sheet, download) and Enfold Proxy 3.0 Beta (data sheet, download). For more information check out the official announcement.

I would like to announce the availability of the Plone 3.0.0 Installer for Windows, which can be downloaded from:

http://www.enfoldsystems.com/downloads.html

The 2.5 Installer has also been updated to include ElementTree, after I saw a message that it is required now (?), and can be downloaded from the same page.

You are welcome to test and report bugs at the usual place, the Plone Trac, under the category ‘Installers’:

http://dev.plone.org/plone/

Update: Since a couple people pointed out (thanks Wichert and Alexander) I should include here a notice.

This is the 3.0-alpha1 release of Plone. I repeat. This is NOT the final 3.0 release.

Thanks for listening. And now, on with the show.

As you may have noticed, this blog has been down for a couple weeks. Some unexplained failure took down the machine that was previously hosting it and I’m still working to recover the box. But that does not mean the world has stopped! I’m still here, alive and kicking.

But back to this post’s subject, there are some good news for the Zope Community. My company, Enfold Systems, has volunteered resources to build and mantain the official Zope Installer for Windows!

Now, why that is important? Regardless of mine and yours personal preferences for one operating or another, the reality is that the great majority of the downloads, specially from people that are trying out Zope and Plone for the first time goes to the Installers for Windows. To cite some informal statistics, as of today the figures on the Plone Project at Sourceforge are:

• Plone-2.5.1-final.tar.gz – 5412
• Plone-2.5.1-Installer-OSX-Intel.zip – 716
• Plone-2.5.1-Installer-OSX-PowerPC.zip – 1300
• plone-2.5.1-zope-2.9-6179.exe – 17577

That’s some pretty rough statistics right there. I don’t have zope.org statistics to compare but I suspect the figures would be pretty similar.

The second reason why this is important is that the Zope Installer for Windows was left for a resonable time without an official mantainer. Tim Peters did an excellent job of keeping it up-to-date for the past releases, but has recently stepped down.

We will now have a dedicated buildbot running nightly builds. That adds an extra 2 installers to the current 4 Plone Installers mantained by Enfold Systems. Chris Withers has volunteered to do some QA and upload the installers to Zope.org when they are ready.

Thanks to everyone on the Zope-Dev Mailing List for their great feedback on some questions I had about improvements to the Installer. To anyone interested in helping to test the Zope Installers, you can grab Zope 2.9.5 or Zope 2.10.0 and give it some testing. And please send your feeback to sidnei at enfoldsystems dot com.

PS: I hope to get the old posts imported back into this site sometime next week.

Get it while it’s hot, and let us know if there are any issues.

The more important change in this release is the removal of
registration of the Python included in the installer as the Default
Python in the system.

That seemed to cause enough confusion with inexperienced users to
justify it’s immediate removal.

Advanced users should be avanced enough to be able to setup this
manually. The feature might come back in the form of a entry in the
Plone -> Development start menu entry if anyone misses it.