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As we dont have a wiki at plone.org just add comments to the site and i'll insert the ideas to the main-text. Thank you!

Im- and Export of Content

Plone lacks a good generic system to export all or a selection of content to the file-system, ready for import into an other Plone-Instance or just for backup-purposes. The *.zexp is a binary format and also the xml-based zexp isnt something one like to generate or transformate from a other xml-based format.

XMLForest steps into this gap and provides a standard conform XML-based export and import format. It uses ATXML provided by the Marshall product (shipped with Plone since version 2.5) for serialization and deserialization of single Archetypes based objects. A standardized IMS-Content-Package (IMS-CP) manifest.xml file contains all structural information like folder-structure, references (like needed for LinguaPlone multilingual content or related to information) and Relations (for complex constraint based references including contentish references and relations). The IMS-CP is a zip-file containing the manifest and those ATXML-exports and if needed binary files. The concept is similar to JAR-files or OpenDocument-Format (and several others).

Marshall is in a good shape, but needs some refactoring and componentization.

XMLForest is a new product which needs tests, a better security concept and a simple UI.

And over all: Documentation is needed.

If everything works out fine XMLForest might be included in Plone 3.0.

Versioning

Plones weakest part is missing built in versioning concepts. Workflow is great, there are plenty use-case specific products for versioning but whats missing is a generic layer for those use-case centric products.

Another idea is to use a subversion together with XMLForest exports as a content-repository. Building tools for automatic im/ export into such an respository could be an approach to sync content between Plones on Production-Servers and a local working copy instance ready for editong while sitting in a train.

Offline Editing

Based on the XMLForest IMS-Content-Package theres is the plan to develop an simple offline-editor for those files. The editor itself need to read and unzip the IMS-CP, need to know about the atxml-structure (similar to archetypes schema) and provide an ui to fetch a file from a plone, save it local, show its structure, edit files using appropiate editors, save the changes and sync them back (re-import using XMLForests update feature) to the Plone.

Debian-Packaged

Plone and Zopes Debian packages are in a bad shape. Current statement is: use them for testing Plone, but dont use them for production sites, better use the source Luke. We want to think about a solution for this. It includes more than just technical issues, like organisational and financial ones.