Preface

Welcome to Jeffrey Shell's Zope 3 tutorial. Its goal is to give web developers familiar with Python an jump start at Zope 3's powerful Component Architecture by implementing a very simple application, a TODO list manager. The tutorial's five steps initially started out as five entries on Jeff's former blog. Since this site is no longer operational, Jeff was so kind to let me take over the maintaince of this tutorial.

To give you an idea about Jeff's motivation on writing a series of introduction level texts on Zope 3, here's an excerpt from his posting on 5 March 2005:

I'd like to remind the audience that this is based on How to make a todo list program with Rails 0.9. It's a simple and well written application, and I'm wanting to show Python programmers that they needn't necessarily copy Rails - that there are existing solutions for Python that, in my opinion, fit the Python mindset better. If you want to program in Rails, by all means just learn Ruby and use Rails and enjoy it. But me - I like Python, I have existing applications and libraries in it, and as I start to really explore Zope 3, I'm getting really excited about using it, which hopefully I can do in near-future work related projects.

Using the Rails Todo List example is how I'm finally pushing myself to investigate building a simple but complete Zope 3 application. There may be better ways to accomplish some of what I try here. I'm no Zope 3 expert. I have followed its development and had a hand in some of the concepts early on (many years ago), but have not had the chance to build anything substantial until now. So I thank the authors of the "How to make a todo list program with rails" document for generating some excitement and giving me an idea of something to build, and I hope that they don't mind my usage of what they document as basis for my explorations.

I hope you'll enjoy going through this tutorial as much as I did. If you have any questions or problems, please don't bother Jeff but email me directly. I'm looking forward to receiving feedback.

Philipp von Weitershausen, Zope 3 developer and author of Web Component Development with Zope 3

A short note about the status of this work

I gave this tutorial the way I received it from Jeff the version number "1.0". I have not yet edited anything, neither grammatically nor technically. Updates will follow, including an editorial review and a compatability check for Zope 3.1, and be announced on worldcookery.com.

Contents

Step 1: Basic interfaces and classes

Step 2: Wiring the Todo into Zope 3

Step 3: Configuring basic add/edit views for the ZMI

Step 4: Making a Skin for the Todo App

Step 5: Browser Views