One of the great things about Zope 2 is it guides you through the first steps and helps you create a dynamic Web site with minimal effort. I'm starting to see that same quality in the latest release of Zope X3, version 3.0.0b2. (Zope X3 is the project leading up to Zope 3.) Zope X3 has a web interface for creating folders, files, images, templates, and various services. And, going beyond Zope 2, Zope X3 rewards curious clickers with API documentation, error reports, and other goodies.

This is very refreshing for me. For a long time now, I've been looking at the depths of Zope 3 without looking at the surface. I've been discouraged with some of the low level decisions. Now that Zope 3 is reaching a level of usability, however, I can approach it from the top like I did with Zope 2. From that perspective, the things I don't like are pretty unimportant. Zope 3 is going to be cool.

Here are a few things I think Zope 3 needs, however.

• Ape. I may be biased, but Ape is working really well for this site (which is running on Zope 2.) Everything is under version control rather than imprisoned in binary files. If something goes wrong, recovery is going to be a lot easier than it would be if I used a big database file. Zope 3 could benefit from Ape in the same way.
• During code development, Zope 3 should detect changes to source code and configuration files and restart automatically. In Zope 2, I could hardly bear developing code for Zope 2 until I wrote the "refresh" feature. The feature turned out to be unstable, but it still allowed me to work without breaking my concentration, making me more productive. In Zope 3, we should take the more stable route of simply restarting after detecting code changes. Zope 3 can probably restart in under 3 seconds on a recent box.
• Use Twisted as the core server in Zope. In the past, two things prevented me from doing this: I wasn't happy with the quality of the HTTP server in Twisted, and the method of setting up an HTTP server in Zope 3 was mind-bogglingly complicated. The HTTP server in Twisted may have improved by now, and server configuration in Zope 3 has improved tenfold.

So, of these three improvements that I think Zope 3 needs, which is most important? Now that I finally got comments working on my weblog, readers can actually reply to that question. :-)