Dexterity now has a project area

Readers of this blog may have heard of Dexterity before. In brief, it's an attempt to bridge the gap between Plone's current content type story and a more modern way of writing Zope components. Dexterity types can be built entirely through-the-web, in XML (e.g. through dedicated tools ala ArchGenxML), or in easy to understand, boilerplate-free Python code.

Over the past few months, Dexterity has come a long way, and I think we're nearing a beta release. There's some ongoing refactoring to make parts of Dexterity more useful, in particular to factor out the form handling to be usable without content types, and a few more holes to plug, but it's starting to feel quite solid.

To that end, we've created a project area on Google code: http://code.google.com/p/dexterity. Here, you can find a mailing list (via Google Groups), a wiki and an issue tracker. Note that the source code is still hosted in the Plone svn repository, and we have no plans of moving it.

Why not put it on plone.org/projects? In part because plone.org is due an upgrade and so the timing was a bit bad, but also because Dexterity is a bit bigger than most products hosted on plone.org: bigger in the sense that it consists of multiple components, and bigger in the sense that we hope parts of it can be useful outside Plone. Google code gives us a good issue tracker and a place to throw up documentation easily.