With the first issue of the new year – our third issue to date – ZopeMag returns to regular publication after a relaunch during the last half of 2002. Once again over the course of the quarter we will be publishing Articles and Product Reviews – among other types of text such as interviews – of interest to the Zope community. The ZopeMag staff is certain that different interests of Zope users will be addressed in the current issue.

Kristoph Kirchner, a Zope programmer on the staff of ZopeMag, has written an introduction to Zope Page Templates (ZPTs), a complement to the two articles of his on ZPTs that have appeared in earlier versions of ZopeMag ("Debugging ZPTs" in Issue 2 and "Creating a Database User Interface With Zope Page Templates" in Issue 1).

The majority of the articles in this issue come from authors in the Zope community. It is our interest to make ZopeMag an international forum to give our subscribers an insight into the variety of ways Zope is being used throughout the world.

From the Czech Republic Milos Prudeck will contribute the first of a series of articles describing the building of a community Website using Zope (with XUF, a PHP solution (IMP), and LocalFS as tools).

Steve Alexander – who is currently living in Lithuania – will give us an inside view of the next Zope version, Zope 3, which promises to be far more user-friendly than the versions up to now. The hope is that this will enhance its accessibility for Web designers and programmers, helping grow Zope "by a factor of ten".

One of the people focusing exclusively on this goal is the former CEO of Zope Corporation, Paul Everitt, who is now the Director of Zope Europe. We have interviewed him to find out more.

Finally, Laura Trippi, who is based in Canada, will describe her use of one of the most popular Zope applications today, the "portal-in-a-box" Plone. Her article is called "Coders in Plone". It describes why Plone is effective as an authoring environment for "coders" who are neither Zope programmers/developers, nor Web designers, nor, on the other hand, simple content producers, but some hybrid of all of these.

As with every issue, we welcome our readers' comments, criticism, questions and suggestions. Such feedback enables us to adapt our content to our readership's needs and interests, as well as to expand our view of the versatility of Zope. Once again, the email addresses for feedback and contact with the editor are: feedback@zopemag.com and editor@zopemag.com.