[Community] Upcoming PrimaGIS 0.6 release

[Kai Hänninen]

Hi everyone

Here's a little status report and information on the upcoming PrimaGIS 
0.6 release.

I've just merged back the work we did on the 'styled-layers' branch into 
the trunk. The main goal of this work was to improve the configurability 
of PrimaGIS from within Plone.

Currently PrimaGIS no longer requires a parallel ZCO hierarchy and 
Layers, Styles and Symbolizers are all managed through Plone. Datastores 
are still configured using ZMI, but they are located in a central 
location under the ZCO Map Tool (portal_gis). I believe this will 
greatly simplify managing the PrimaGIS maps.

Until we can produce migration code for the new features your existing 
PrimaGIS setups will not work properly with the current svn HEAD. For 
new maps you can try out the code already and the createPrimaGISDemo 
script is also updated and will create the demo map using the new 
components.

I've also planned that the 0.6.x series would be the last to support 
Zope 2.7 / Plone 2.0. I will support the 0.6.x series in the future in a 
form of bug fix releases, but development would be focused on Plone >= 
2.1 on Zope >= 2.8. If there is need (and hopefully volunteers) we can 
also keep backporting features into the 0.6.x when required.

I would also be interested in learning how many users are currently 
running PrimaGIS on Plone 2.7/Plone 2.0 and not willing/able to upgrade 
and thus be affected by this.

Before we can release 0.6 we still need to (atleast):

  - do testing
  - write migration code
  - update translations
  - update the primagis manual
  - fix any remaining bugs

I would appreciate help with testing, translations and updating the 
manual.  I believe the manual would benefit from a review from a user's 
perspective, because it is sometimes hard for me (as a developer) to see 
and anticipate what is difficult and/or unclear about primagis or what 
should be elaborated further.

cheers,
Kai


-- 
Kai Hänninen                  +358-50-558-7935
Software engineer             www.mbconcert.fi
MB Concert Ky                 kai.hanninen at mbconcert.fi