Plone 2020

The future of Plone - a community-generated roadmap from the 2014 Plone Conference

A Plone 2020 Open Space discussion was held at the 2014 Bristol Plone Conference - "Plone 2020" being our shorthand for "What should Plone be in the year 2020". A large number of people attended. To efficiently elicit ideas from the crowd, Martin Aspeli led a brainstorming session during which people wrote ideas on sticky notes, and Martin and helpers organized them by topic. The goal was to look for areas of consensus regarding the long term direction of Plone. There was in fact a surprising amount of consensus, and the results form a community-generated Plone roadmap.

The 2015 Strategic Summit took these ideas up and developed a consensus on direction.

Summary

We first asked: Why are we here at the conference? Why do we love Plone? Our answers were very consistent:

Community
Features
Security
Technology
Making a living

We next asked: What are the top one or two items that need to be improved? And as Martin eloquently reminded us: If we are going to change Plone, can we please not mess up any of the things we love?

Grouping the broad topic areas by theme and adding a few annotations, here is our community vision of the evolution of Plone. This vision drove work at the conference sprint, and we hope it will guide sprint work in 2015 and beyond.

APIs, hide complexity

Restful JSON API (This is important for the future)
Python API - improve, extend plone.api (This will mitigate risk when making code improvements)

Integrator usability, grow community

Documentation and training
TTW (through the web) theming and templates
Improve deployment

End user usability

Small fixes
Or major overhaul (intranet consortium-type project for mockup-mosaic?)

Code improvements (This is high risk but can be mitigated by above API work)

Simplify code base structure
Remove old/awful stuff, notably CMF, z3c.form (Need for deprecation warnings)

Strategic

Roadmap and communications
Community processes
Motivation and Funding and Marketing

Why do you love Plone?

A transcription (in no particular order) of all the brainstorming ideas, grouped into broad topics.

Community

Wisdom and experience in a box
Shared experience
Community driven development (smart community)
Community
Community
Community: professional and friendly
Community
Community
Helpful and nice community
Community
I love the community
Open source community
People
I am here to learn from clever people
Great developers
Community
Open source
Plone and the Plone community teach me the important skills and ethics
No lead company
Plone community
Community
The nicest community
Open source community
Community
Awesome global community

Features

It is nice to use (user friendly for editing and admin people)
Solves something nobody else does in open source CMS
Flexibility
Incredibly flexible
Plone is a content integration framework that lets me integrate almost everything
Plone is perfect fot the type of projects I love to do: large, feature-rich CMS websites for higher ed and non-profits
Flexibility
Flexibility
I know: no matter how much my client's needs grow, Plone will work for them
Full-featured, directly usable system
Easy to have a full featured site in a short time
Control over and speed of functional development
Rich range of functionality, flexibility
Powerful
Ecosystem
Plone lets me produce solutions to diffferent problems in a consistent repeatable way
Repeatable
Provides a solid foundation to build my solutions
Out of box
Our users depend on Plone to get their message to the world
It allows me to empower my customers to do more themselves, especially in cloud
Best open source CMS for universities

Security

Sustainability (10 years same content)
Plone is a good product
Stable, secure web dev framework
Stability, security, TTW
Very secure
Security
Security
Security
(User group permissions roles) intranet

Technology

Technology
Innovation
Zope component architecture
ZODB
The Zope ecosystem

Making a living

It is my job (that I love)
Pays the bills
Job $
Cost effective development
Its features tick so many boxes that it's easy to sell to big institutions
Guaranteed paid work that is fun to do

Other

Open source commons/resource managed by foundation
Don't know yet! New to Plone!

Identify the top one or two items that need to be improved in Plone

A transcription of all the brainstorming ideas, grouped into broad topics.

JSON/REST API

Provide a web services API
A complete RESTful API
A REST API allowing us to decouple UI from backend
(JSON) / API; (REST) / API; (PY) / API
(Proper) RESTful (JSON) API
JSON REST API
RESTful JSON API +x
Embrace Javascript for UI

Python API

Less ways to do stuff, one canonical way, example: plone.api
Make Plone more pluggable => Well defined APIs for: Authentication, Data export, Syndication between instances
Extend plone.api
Python API to separate Plone features from Zope
Extend plone.api
Make plone.api complete
Sane API
Hide complexity from integrators, newbies, non-programmers through Plone API, easy installation, documentation, training
List features and templates and easy option to turn them on/off - too many hidden stuff now
One style guide for all code

Improve End User UX

"Better" portlet handling
A better UX experience that allows more sophisticated web content without developer
Make the user experience simple and intuitive/beautiful
Improve experience for content editors by combining flexible tile layout editor with outstanding design
As a user I want an easy to use editing experience with an up to date UI
Enhance UX and more designers in community
Make Plone beautiful out of the box (UI, theme)
Better UI
Fix the top content management UX bugs which confuse users, such as default pages and roles

Improve Deployment

Improve developer experience by: 1) Making it obvious where to obtain buildouts; 2) Making Zopeskel/Templer work (and generate good defaults)
Make Plone dead easy to try without installing
Be on every cpanel-esque platform
Provide easy recipes to deploy in various scenarios
Improve ZPublisher for easier deployment story (WSGI)

TTW (through the web) Themes and Templates

Easy add-on installs - click and run
Unify theming solutions
Two ways/techniques for theming that 90% of us are satisfied with
Theme editor that can be used for real in production
Consistent TTW experience so someone newish to the web can create a completely custom site in a day
Empower users with robust tiling/mixing/embedding
TTW view creation/customization and export - and/or Mosaic
Finish TTW development story
Simplified configuration - single source/way of defining content types/registrations (vs. ZCML, GS, ...)
Improve caching support (response times)

Documentation and Training

Engage computing students so they know about Plone before they graduate
Grow community by giving more training to integrators and developers
Cook book with best practice recipes to do things in one proper way
Make Plone more appealing to end users and site owners as opposed to sophisticated devs: 1) Entry level user training; 2) Hide complexity
One globally known single entry point knowledge base (with clear procedures for maintenance)
Make it easier to start Plone development by recommending the right way to do things in the docs, like Python does
Better documentation + plone.api to help new developers starting with Plone
More standards to do certain things

Improve Forms Experience

Kill z3c.form

* Merge z3c.form wrappers into a single form package
* Simplify form generation

Simplify Codebase Structure - Remove Old Code

Clean up multiple ways to do the exact same things in the codebase
Remove (replace) old cpy/cpt/... code
Clean up dependencies, i.e. remove CMF
Remove CMF
Move/merge Zope/CMF into Plone ecosystem to make it more usable
Remove CMF*
When I run a PDB and list all the methods of an object, I want that list much shorter...
Remove old/deprecated code (CMF, etc.)
Remove monkey patching as the default recommendation - make it easier to override Plone internals to avoid this
Simpler codebase
Clean legacy (improve developer experience)
Only 2 ways for doing things (i.e. consistency)
Update core for new web standards
Remove complexity around writing views (context of view variables, template attr in ZCML, etc.)
Reduce number of eggs
Would like to have Plone smaller - some packages should be available as add-ons
Reduce cognitive overload by simplifying core
Grok vs. ZCML - pick one and make consistent documentation for it
Improve dev's experience by removing/hiding ZCML
Possibility to view (chart? - like DCWorkflows does) all products and dependencies when installing a product (and sub-product)
Do not break if one part breaks
Stable software stack
Do things the right way (eventually)

Roadmap and Communications

Give Zope some love (sprint? roadmap, plan)
Roadmap should inform users and potential customers where Plone is going and that Plone is vital and in active development
Roadmap communicates the vision of the community and leads to discussion

Motivation and Funding and Marketing

Find way to pay/motivate bright minds to get stuff done <-- board/framework team agreed with
Do more fund-raising to be more effective in achieving goals that are set
Fund marketing to gain more visibility
Help Plone companies market Plone
Improve public visibility by sharing success stories and have a clear picture for people not in the community

Community Processes

Less bitching
Change foundation rules to empower leaders more
Bring Martin and Laurence back to the community
Bring Martin and Lwrence back to the community
Discuss issues openly in a friendly way

Other

Improve connectivity with other systems/DBs/single sign on
Breathalyzer on github commits
Be Python 3 compatible
I want to create a product that will be used by others - I can't be more concrete because I'm new!