Zine is an evolving project and currently far from where we want to go. Our plan is to develop an open source blogging platform with a simple administration interface and high extensibility.
We want to make the life easy for designers, administrators and authors. The template system uses template inheritance and you only have to change a single template and a css file to give your blog a personal appearance. Zine is distributed in a debian inspired manner. The code and the data are totally separated and you can upgrade Zine from your distribution's package manager once your distribution has a package for it.
For later releases we want to simplify the administration interface and implement Atom publishing to make editing for authors as simple as possible.
We have a strong focus on web standards and security. Zine generates valid HTML 4 everywhere and generates Atom feeds. An extensible markup language called ZEML accepts a user friendly dialect of HTML and ensures that proper and valid HTML is generated.
Zine also provides a clean API for scripting. Experienced developers can operate on the data from a python shell or scripts. This can be used to automate maintenance tasks or debug custom plugins.
Internationalization is another top priority goal. Zine supports Unicode and is fully translatable and localizable.