Last summer the Five project pulled Zope 3's i18n architecture into the Zope 2 world, thanks to work done by Philipp von Weitershausen, Lennart Regebro and others (please forgive me if I forget someone!).

And yesterday, Philipp posted a useful article on his site describing how to use it.

He probably didn't expect that Silva was going to switch over to this codebase the next day! I ran into yet another unicode error in Silva today when I was hacking on it. It was the last straw. PlacelessTranslationService's wild hackery had been screwing up Silva's unicode support up long enough... Like Carthago of old to the ancient Romans, PlacelessTranslationService Delenda Est: it must be destroyed.

Thanks to the great work done by the Zope 3 developers, the Five developers, and the nice article Philipp wrote about it, a few hours later PlacelessTranslationService had been purged from Silva. Lots of custom cruft has been removed from Silva, and removing code while retaining functionality is always good.

This is part of a general trend in the Zope world; people are throwing away their custom code and can start to rely on cleaner solutions developed lower down the framework. This allows for smooth evolution and convergence between frameworks. It increases the size of communities using the same codebase, which makes it more likely people will work on it to improve it. I believe that the Zope community, with Five and other efforts, is only beginning to tap into the full potential of this pattern.