For beehive this magazine is yet another manifestation of our vision to educate people on the incredible potential that Zope has, and to get the most out of Zope development. Every three months, we will bring you articles from our acclaimed authors Michel Pelletier, Martina Brockmann, Nico Grubert, and K. Kirchner in addition to important voices from the Zope community.

In addition to great articles, we will address one of the most frequent comments we hear from Zopistas both new and old:

"I've installed Zope. It's great! But out of the 550 Zope Products available which ones should I take a look at?"

Our product reviews will help you find the products that are most relevant to your development projects and keep you abreast of new developments in the Zope community.


In this issue: Zope for Intranets

While it is difficult to keep track of all the ways people use Zope, we hear from most developers and organizations that their first Zope experience involves building an intranet. It makes a lot of sense. Climbing the Zope learning curve is easier when your user base is (one would hope) more forgiving of newbie errors. And, perhaps more importantly, the intranet is an important technology springboard: a well-crafted Zope intranet is often the first step toward using Zope in other ways, including public-facing internet sites.

Most intranet developers have some challenges in common: integrating with existing data stores, managing user data, and transferring knowledge and documents, to name a few. In Zope Mag this quarter, we examine some of the techniques and technologies that can help the Zope intranet developer tackle these issues.

K. Kirchner uncovers new ways to manage legacy relational data in Relational Databases and Zope Page Templates. Michel Pelletier discusses the finer points of workflow and gives some examples using MetaFlow, a Zope component that can help organizations implement their internal business logic. In the first of a multi-part series, K. Kirchner deals with Customizing User Folders in order to get a better picture of system users. Our reviews this month also cover useful Zope products for intranet developers: Document Library and External File help manage users' files, while ZShrink and Zwiki give your users powerful communication tools.

Also in this issue...

... since we review the Zwiki product in this issue, we interview Ward Cunningham, creator of the first Wiki web about his experiences in online collaboration.