Celebration: Zope 4 final release

TL;DR: Zope 4 beta phase ended, final version released!

After hard, long years of preparation Earl Zope now finally made it to get a permanent license for the Python 3 wonderland: In September 2016 almost 20 people started with the reanimation of Zope at the Zope Resurrection sprint. This marked the beginning of a wonderful journey for Earl Zope himself for the people who helped him. In August 2017 Earl Zope became aware that his Python 2 country will irreversibly be destroyed by 2020. Earl Zope was successfully applying for for a beta permission for the Python 3 wonderland in September 2017. This beta permission has been extended 9 times to give Earl Zope time to become a good citizen in his new home country.

Earl Zope says a big thank you to all who:

  • contributed to the Python 3 migration even before the resurrection sprint
  • wrote bug reports
  • fixed bugs
  • contributed time and/or money for the migration process
  • encouraged the developers
  • tested beta versions or even used them in production

To be welcome in the Python 3 wonderland many nuts had to be cracked:

  • porting of the code of Zope and its dependencies to Python 3
  • rewrite of RestrictedPython from scratch
  • develop a migration strategy for the ZODB contents aka Data.fs
  • polish the user interface of the Zope management interface (ZMI)
  • and many more…

Earl Zope is looking forward to a happy future in the Python 3 wonderland. Currently he did not yet give up his settling in the Python 2 land. This is planned to happen shortly before or after the Python 2 sunset in the beginning of 2020 when the son of Earl Zope IV becomes the new Earl Zope V. See the roadmap for details.

See the documentation how to install Zope. It also documents the migrations steps.

Author: Michael Howitz

I am a software developer at gocept in Halle (Saale). To develop software, I mainly use Python, Zope, ZTK and Django.

6 thoughts on “Celebration: Zope 4 final release”

  1. Hi. Congratulations on this achievement! I’ve been running and developing a zope based application using zope 2.9.9. I will give it a try. I have two questions (let me know if there is a better forum for this). Would it be feasible to simply export from 2.9.9 and then import into 4? second, any support for source code control (we develop mostly with PScripts and templates)?

    1. Hi Fernando, it is a big jump from Zope 2.9 to Zope 4. I’d upgrade to 2.10 and then to 2.13 first. This would also require updating the Zope Products you use. If everything runs fine on Zope 2.13, you can start to move to Zope 4 as described in the documentation. Maybe you’ll need some help as – besides many other things – e. g. the default encoding has changed.

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