Expert Python Programming, a new book from Packt Publishing, aims to help developers build better applications in Python with the help of best practices and new development techniques.

Writing code in Python is simple, however, writing code that is efficient and easy to maintain and reuse is not so straightforward. This is where this book intends to step in. Written by Tarek Ziadé, a contributor to the Zope code and an experienced Python developer, Expert Python Programming takes you on a practical tour of Python application development.

For more information on the book, please visit http://www.packtpub.com/expert-python-pr...

Packt Publishing announced the winner of their 2008 Best Open Source Other CMS Award and it is Plone.

Packt is delighted to exclusively reveal the first category winner of the 2008 Open Source CMS Award as Plone. Run[ning] on the Zope application server, Plone wins the Best Other Open Source CMS Award and receives $2,000. Also recognized by the judges were dotCMS and DotNetNuke who finished second and third respectively, both picking up $500.

Although I'm not a Plone user, I've been quietly rooting for Plone to come out on top as the best non-PHP content management system.  This looks to be Plone's moment to shine.

I thought it was interesting that the judges praised "the ecosystem that is developing around Python and Zope is encouraging" for which supports Python.  While Python is one of the few languages I still work with, I've heard from other users over the years that they are hesitant to use Plone since they also would need to learn more about Zope.  In some ways, this award is a validation by the judges that running Plone on the Zone application server is a positive and not a negative.

I'm also happy to see dotCMS and DotNetNuke were recognized.  I've talked about DotNetNuke for some time and recently started covering the progress of dotCMS.

"Coming up soon is the Plone Strategic Planning Summit at the Googleplex in Mountain View, where about 50 people from all over the Plone community meet to discuss the future of Plone (more on the actual summit in a later post). Many people have taken this as a reason to post their ideas how Plone might look like in the future, such as Martin Aspeli, Alexander Limi and many others (many of them also on the mailing lists).

So I thought I might also write down my idea about the future."

"This hotfix corrects a vulnerability in the statusmessages and linkintegrity modules, where unsafe network data was interpreted as python pickles. This allows an attacker to run arbitrary python code within the Zope/Plone process.

This issue has been assigned CVE-2007-5741.

Affected versions

• Plone 2.5 up to and including 2.5.4
• Plone 3.0 up to and including 3.0.2

These fixes are included in the 2.5.5 and 3.0.3 releases, at which point this hotfix can be removed."

Complete Story

Michael Wnuk from Turtol recently wrote to us asking for a review of his open source content management system, TurtolCMS.  He also  invited CMS Report readers to review the CMS and give comments.  The following is Michael Wnuk's e-mail to us about his CMS in its entirety:

My company, Turtol, is actively developing the TurtolCMS.  It's an open source, design agnostic content management system  targeting website owners with minimal technical expertise.

We've been using the TurtolCMS since March of 2007 for client work, at first, simply as a templating engine. Now we grant our clients access to editing tools so they can perform simple updates themselves.

So, Python isn't really a CMS topic unless you're a Plone user.  However, as my world at work slowly moves from Python to Java as the language of choice...I'll promote this underdog open source language anytime.  From the IBM developerWorks site:

Adopt Python to manage UNIX® systems while incorporating concepts of good program design. Python is an easy-to-learn, open source scripting language that lets system administrators do their job more quickly. It can also make tasks more fun.

Complete Story

Last week, Plone 3.0 was released.  Plone is the infamous content management system that runs on the Python-based Zope application server.   The install of Plone is known to be very easy with Plone, Python, and Zope already packaged together in the installer.

Highlights to the new features/improvements in Plone 3.0 that the Plone team would like to stress via their announcement are listed below.   I provided links to further details on those features I thought needed a better explanation or were just too exciting to leave alone.

• Full version support, history and reverting to older revisions
• Improved performance
• Inline (Ajax) editing