Zope 2 switches to Launchpad

If you’re a web developer, you’ve almost certainly heard of Zope.

If you’re not familiar with Zope, here’s a quick overview. It’s a free software web application framework that comes in two flavours: Zope 2 and Zope3. The Plone and Silva content management systems use it as their base, as do several high profile websites. Our very own Launchpad makes heavy use of Zope 3.

Earlier this year the Zope 3 project (a “next generation Zope” team) adopted Launchpad for bug tracking. Now the main Zope 2 project is moving to Launchpad as well. Jim Fulton, CTO of the Zope Corporation, explained why:

“Launchpad works great and, with its many project support tools, allows us to focus on creating a great Zope platform without being distracted by developing our own project-management tools.”

The Launchpad team have helped the Zope project to move all their bug history to Launchpad, allowing them to pick up exactly where they left off. I asked Jim how smoothly the move went for Zope 3:

“Very. The Launchpad team took a custom data export format from us and imported it into Launchpad with great fidelity, keeping old issues readily accessible.”

So, other than enabling the Zope guys to do away with the burden of running their own bug tracking tool, what else does Launchpad offer them? Andreas Jung, also of Zope, explained that “managing Zope 2 and Zope 3 bugs together on LP makes sense since Zope 2 includes large parts of the Zope 3 core”.

Launchpad’s ability to track how the same bug affects different communities and projects is ideally suited to this situation.

Now, if the Zope 3 team find that one of the bugs they’re tracking also affects Zope 2, they can push that bug to Zope 2’s bug list. From that point, the bug and its comment history are shared between the two projects, while retaining separate statuses and importance levels.

I’d like to give a warm welcome to Zope 2 on behalf of the Launchpad team. If you’d like more information on using Launchpad for your project, email us or join us in #launchpad on Freenode.

Update: The Zope Content Management Framework now also uses Launchpad to track its bugs!

One Response to “Zope 2 switches to Launchpad”

  1. Harshad Joshi Says:

    When is the source code of Launchpad to be released, its an excellant collaboration tool I have ever seen…Kudos to the developers.

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