Hello there!

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.