Preparation for release

• Make sure the version.txt number is correct.
• Make sure HISTORY.txt is updated with new version number and release date
• Make sure migration step has been added from last release and the next releases (if there are parallel ones, like 2.1.4 being released after 2.5.1)
• Make sure migration steps have been added for bugfix releases of previous major versions
• Make sure all unit tests / functional tests pass.
• Make sure print and presentation style sheets display correctly, and that no elements have been added that should be filtered out.
• Run a fresh instance of the front page of Plone through the following validators to check for errors:
  • XHTML validation
  • CSS validation
  • Bobby (Make sure you check both 508 and WAI compliancy)
• Make sure Plone/Zope does not display any error messages or notifies during normal (non-debug) startup, and doesn't log anything useless (like the useless "total failure getting folder listing" log message etc) during normal usage.
• IMPORTANT: Tag the release.
• Update build script.
• Create tarball with build script.
• Check in updated build script
• Tag build script

After creating tarball

• Send tarball to users on a few different platforms, and make sure it works.
• Put tarball on Sourceforge/Google Code (the build scripts can do this).
• Notify maintainers of the following platforms / package formats (current maintainers in parentheses):
  • Windows (andy at clearwind.ca)
  • Mac OS X (ksgill at mac.com)
  • RPM (simon at longsleep.org)
  • OpenBSD (mbalmer at openbsd.org)
  • FreeBSD (filippo.natali at gmail.com)
  • Debian and Ubuntu (pkg-zope-developers at lists.alioth.debian.org)
  • Gentoo (radek at gentoo.org and batlogg at gentoo.org)
  • SUSE (markus at remset.net)

(There's lots more steps to watch out for, please add them to this list if you have any)