Press Release

Digital Creations Enhances Open Source Application Server

FREDERICKSBURG, Va., Jan. 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Creations, leaders in time-to-market-focused content management solutions, today announced the release of Zope 2.3, a new edition of the leading Open Source application server. The new release is focused on increased ease-of-use and improved performance.

Zope specializes in rapid delivery of rich content to wide audiences, and Digital Creations bases its services business in content management on the Zope platform.

    New in the 2.3 release:
    * Scripts allow safe web management of logic, dramatically improving the
      ease of site design
    * Cache Manager provides a powerful caching infrastructure for
      dramatically improving site responsiveness while retaining dynamicism
    * Built-in infrastructure for complex virtual hosting of multiple sites in
      one server
    * Significantly improved Zope Management Interface for web-based authoring
      and administration
    * Other important changes, such as improvements in WebDAV support,
      customizable object creation, running an optional server for browsing
      source documents, significant improvements in cataloging and indexing,
      and support for abstract interfaces

``This is the most significant release since the move to Zope 2.0 in summer 1999,'' says Paul Everitt, CEO of Digital Creations. ``We took a major step on easing the learning curve and accelerating speed of development, which will be the focus over the coming months. At the same time, we've rolled in important improvements for content management.''

``Our products and services require full use of the power Zope delivers,'' says Doug Hellmann, Director of Portal Development for ZapMedia (www.zapmedia.com). ``The 2.3 release shows the increase in Zope's growth through the substantial improvements in performance, scalability and ease-of- use.''

Zope 2.3 will be released in January 2001, in source form and with binaries available for Linux, Windows, and Solaris.

About Digital Creations

Digital Creations was formed in 1995 as a joint venture with Infinet, itself a joint venture between newspaper chains Gannett, Knight Ridder, and Landmark Communications. Infinet's goal was to bring newspapers online, providing a point of presence on the Web for every newspaper, that could then be resold under the paper's own brand.

Digital Creations was commissioned to develop a classified advertisement engine for the Internet. As part of that work, they developed Bobo, a free toolset for publishing and storing Python objects; Principia, a commercial superset of Bobo aimed at the application server market; and Aqueduct, a commercial package that integrated relational data into the application server. When the partnership with Infinet dissolved in 1997, Digital Creations received the intellectual property rights for the products.

In 1998, the company received its first round of financing. Hadar Pedhazur, a principal at Verticality, the company that provided the funding, convinced Digital Creations to merge the free and commercial software into a unified, free, Open Source product. The first version of Zope was released in December 1998.

In November 2000, Digital Creations closed a $12 million round of Series C funding, led by Whitney & Co. The funding round is being used to scale the company and build significant strategic partnerships.

About Zope

Zope is the leading Open Source application server for dynamic, high- performance Web services. Zope's unique integrated object database and object model greatly simplify the job of creating and deploying truly impressive Web applications. Zope delivers content management, comprehensive database integration, application development and support for a wide range of operating systems, Web servers and databases.

Since Digital Creations introduced Zope as an Open Source product in late 1998, Zope has quickly become the platform of choice for demanding application developers and content managers. As an Open Source solution, Zope is available free of charge, and comes with complete source code. More information about Zope is available at http://www.zope.org .

Key Customers

Digital Creations has provided high-end solutions for organizations such as newspapers and other media, telecommunications firms, the government, the military, educational institutions, and Internet businesses. Customers include WebMD, the U.S. Navy, HomeGain.com, ZapMedia, Cox Communications, and a major television-broadcasting network.