Plone 2.1 is an important release for Plone developers, and makes it even easier to develop for Plone.

Some highlights include:

• Major rewrites of earlier bottlenecks in the system, cleaned up a lot of code. 3500 check-ins and 18 months of code refinement since the 2.0 release
• Over 1500 unit tests ensure the integrity of the Plone code base
• Catalog-based listings and navtree/sitemap means improved speed and more visible and easy-to-understand security policies
• The new ExtendedPathIndex index solves common catalog query use cases in an elegant and scalable way:
• Navigation Trees
• Folder listings
• Site maps
• The new ResourceRegistries makes it easy for your product to add globally defined Javascript and CSS definitions without any ugly hacks — and uninstall them cleanly
• New sortable title index makes it easier to sort listings in an efficient way — it's also smart about sorting, and handles:
• Uppercase/lowercase are sorted correctly
• Numeric sorting: 2 comes before 12 without having to pad with zeroes
• New is_folderish index allows catalog operations on folderish objects without waking up the object
• Plone 2.1 includes ECMAUnit — unit testing of Javascript!

For theme creators, we've made it much easier to selectively replace parts of the Plone user interface using CSS, so their code can be leaner and easier to develop. It makes it easier to change the public-facing elements while keeping the editing UI, for instance.

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