This year's Sorrento sprint, which is the second sprint of that kind, took place in (guess where...) Sorrento, Italy from the 26th to the 30th of March, 2008. It was great fun, and I'm sure you'll find lots of blog posts about the event itself, so I'll keep to the technical stuff here.
If you're interested in Pictures related to the sprint go to Flickr and check out the images with the keyword sorrentosprint2008.
There was a round of short presentations about the topics covered at the sprint on Saturday evening and this is a short overview of what went on and, more importantly, where you can go if you need to know more or want to get involved. The people I mention either lead the sprint topic, or are the contact persons or "champions" for the given topic. In most cases people did not work on the topics alone of course, but I thought having 40 different names in here doesn't really make sense.
Balazs Ree and his team worked on Selenium tests for the KSS framework. KSS is, as you surely know, the Ajax framework that employs an easy-to-understand, CSS-like syntax and which ships with Plone. After overcoming a major authentication issue, work seems to have progressed rather smoothly and according to Balazs some extensive documentation on how to use the Selenium test framework for KSS was written. Sylvain Viollon worked on Funittest and its documentation and wrote a paster template for easy Funittest creation. He also created a Funittest for the Plone integration of KSS.
Background
Selenium is a test-framework that allows
recording, manual editing and playback of user actions in a browser.
You start the recorder, click around in your page, edit the resulting
script -- which is basically a transcript of what you just did in your
browser -- and then have it run automatically to see if things fail.
Funittest is a functional test tool based on Selenium Remote Control. It proposes a way of creating a model stack for different levels of abstraction, helping the developer sketch out their functional tests in a modular and reusable way.
More Information
Get Involved
The main developers behind KSS are Godefroid Chapelle and Balazs Ree, you can find them in the IRC channel under the usernames "__gotcha" and "ree" or you could just sign up to the KSS development newsgroup at gmane.comp.web.kss.devel. If you're interested in Funittest check out the OpenPlans Funittest project website.
Malthe Borch worked on implementing a Xapian search engine backend for collective.index and started a fork for a z3c-package with the same purpose so that Zope 3 and Grok users will have something to play with soon as well.
Background
The portal_catalog is what is used to run
searches and all kinds of related things in Plone. The objects in Plone
can be quite big, and to find out what is in them they have to be
loaded into memory, often referred to as "waking up". This is OK when
looking at a couple of objects, but can quickly turn into a
memory-hogging, slow procedure when a larger amount of objects get
involved. To evade this, the catalog keeps the most important
information about the objects in a very efficient and quickly
searchable data structure that gets queried when a search is started. A
search can be a full-text search with a search form, but can also be
the search for sub-objects of a folder to build its navigation.
Although being quite dependable ZCatalog is showing its age and there
has been some discussion about what it should be replaced with.
collective.indexing is a framework that provides an abstract layer for queued indexing. Queueing can significantly improve performance and by acting as a sort of middleware it is possible to plug in different indexing/search engine backends. collective.indexing started off as a project from Jarn and was based on enfold.indexing.
Lucene is a search engine library written in Java that can be used for all sorts of text searches. Since it's based on Java it is platform-independent. Solr is a search engine implemented with the Lucene library.
Xapian does pretty much the same thing as Lucene does, but it's implemented in C++. I have not seen any benchmarks, but I guess this would make it faster than the Java-based Lucene.
More Information
Get Involved
There is currently no place to go other than the developer mailing list,
so reply to the aforementioned thread if you want to contribute. You
can also ask Andreas Zeidler (witsch) or Helge Tesdal (tesdal) for more
information on collective.indexing, or Malthe Borch (malthe) for more
information on the z3c-package on the IRC channel.
Christian Scholz worked on Microformat support in Plone, which he apparently managed to finish. During his presentation he showed what Microformats can do in a short demo where he could add dates from a Plone event into a Google calendar with the click of a button! He also showed a that keywords can be hooked up with tags in Flickr. Pretty cool! He has created a blog post about this and announced to have more info coming soon.
Background
Microformats try to standardize a set of plain
XHTML attributes (e.g. classes) so that software scanning the page can
actually tell if and where a certain piece of information is. Let's use
the calendar example from above: A program scanning the page (e.g. a
plugin in a browser) can not really know where the start- and end-dates
are unless it gets some hints from the HTML-code. In the case of the
start-date the HTML class-name of the element that contains the date
would be "dtstart" according to the "hcalendar" date and events format.
Check out the Microformats page linked below to find out more about
different formats and their use.
More Information
Get Involved
As far as I understand it the work is pretty
much finished, but if you feel like it, contact Christian Scholz, who
is MrTopf on the IRC channel, or drop a note to the developer mailinglist.
Beside Microformats, Christian Scholz also worked on a way to use local configurations in Plone on a per-folder basis and a new commenting system that actually uses local configurations to enable/disable commenting on parts of a site. He had begun working on local configurations at the Snow Sprint, but implemented a new approach based on local Site Managers. The implementation is working, but apparently needs some UI-love since there is no control panel yet.
The commenting system the team worked on is considered to be a prototype and might go through some refactoring. A test-framework is on the way and Christian will post something with more technical details soon, so check out his blog.
Background
So far you can only activate or deactivate
things like commenting globally on a Plone site. For many use-cases it
would actually make sense to be able to have no commenting on, but to
enable it in a certain sub-tree of the site. Local configurations will
be able to deliver this by offering a small control panel on each
folder where settings can be adjusted.
More Information
Get Involved
Again, if you want to get involved let MrTopf know by chatting him up on the IRC channel, or by contacting the developer mailinglist.
Xavier Heymans presented the work of the PloneGov team at the sprint and showed how amazingly fast PloneGov is spreading in Belgium and other countries and suggested ways to get funding for PloneGov from local governments. There was not that much development going on at the sprint, but a lot of networking with Plonistas from Italy and Switzerland.
Background
PloneGov was started as a project to congregate
the efforts in e-Government of a couple of small towns in Belgium. It
grew rapidly and is now in use in over 15 countries. Based, as the name
suggests, on Plone, it's purpose is to develop software that fits the
needs of governments with the help of and tailored to the needs of the
public sector.
More Information
Get Involved
If you feel like joining the PloneGov community just go to the about page on the PloneGov project site and look for the nearest member project.
Alec Mitchell and Maurizio Delmonte worked on a Plone-specific package for contentratings called plone.contentratings. It adds through-the-web configuration for setting up rating categories and seems to be very stable -- even though some polishing is still needed for a release. As there is no Product page on plone.org yet for it, see below for the subversion repository if you want to give it a shot.
Background
Many portals feature some kind of ratings
system where users can judge how good or bad a given content item is.
plone.contentratings offers an easy way to enable ratings for certain
content types in Plone. If need ratings can be disabled for single
objects, and there are plans to enable/disable ratings on a per-folder
basis (possibly using Local Configurations?). Multi-ratings are also
supported, which means that one object can be rated
according to different rating categories, e.g. to rate a news article's
quality and its relevance separately.
More Information
Get Involved
To get involved in the project, contact Alec Mitchell (alecm) or Maurizio Delmonte (miziodel) on the IRC channel, or by contact the developer mailinglist.
Daniel Nouri, Thomas Mogense and whole lot of others were working on Singing & Dancing, a new newsletter Product for Plone. The team was quite big and there were lots of discussions about use cases and functionality going on to make sure that Singing & Dancing becomes as versatile as possible. Some work was also done on the administrative interface and many members of the team are still meeting regularly on Skype and on the Google Group.
Background
With Singing & Dancing, you can send
an existing Plone page as a newsletter, or automatically have it send
out scheduled newsletter with the contents of folders or even
collections. It is actually split up into two packages,
collective.singing and collective.dancing. Singing is a library that's
meant to be generally useful for messaging and notification tasks.
Dancing is the installable Plone Product that provides a newsletter
implementation based on Singing, ready for use out of the box. There's
a bunch of really good doctests in each package and according to the
Products page it is easily expandable with plug-ins. For an
architectural overview check the interfaces.py file in the singing
Product.
More Information
Get Involved
If you can think of more use cases for a newsletter Product or want to take part in the development join the Google Group or talk to Daniel Nouri (nouri) or Thomas Mogense (tmog) on the IRC channel.
Jens Klein, Robert Niederreiter and their team were working on Devilstick, which aims some day to be a replacement for Archetypes. They had lots of discussions about the concept and refactored Devilstick a couple of times. At the final presentation they showed a basic but working issue tracker based on Devilstick.
Background
Archetypes has long been the standard way of
creating content types for Plone. Unfortunately it is starting to show
its age and it has always been quite a huge monster that does lots of
magic tricks hardly anyone could fathom and that would sometimes lead
to great frustration. Devilstick is aiming to be the slick and sexy
alternative based on Zope 3's component architecture. It borrows an
analogy from chemistry which, although it caused some controversy,
seems to fit quite well. There are molecules, atoms and cages, which
are basically a special kind of molecule. Molecules, and thereby cages
as well, can contain atoms and more molecules. So think of atoms as
single fields, molecules as groups of fields and cages as the topmost
root of the whole object. Since molecules can contain molecules
themselves you could compare those contained objects to subgroups of a
parent molecule. If you need to know more just go to the Devilstick
project homepage and check out the documentation. You can also give
plone.devilstick.simpletype a shot, it has examples and even a tutorial
in the README.txt.
More Information
Get Involved
It seems that the primary discussion is going on in the developer mailinglist, but there is also a #devilstick channel on IRC.
Spanky (I don't have a clue what his real name is, but he's
SpankyFromBRC on IRC) is the "champion" for the "Future of Archetypes",
that is he was assigned to the topic at the Plone Strategic Planning Summit 2008. The topic id for the "Future of Archetypes" topic is PSPS08-7832 and you can find more information in the tracker ticket.
The two main-masterminds behind Devilstick are Jens Klein (jensens) and
Robert Niederreiter (rnix), so if you have questions make sure to bug
them on Plone's or Devilstick's IRC channels.
A big fat Thank You, or "mille grazie" rather, to the Sprint organisers and sponsors for giving us such a lovely time in Sorrento! And another big Cheers for the people who checked my flimsy attempt at reproducing what went on in the different groups.
To keep the PloneBuzz newscast from drying out please give feedback about cool new Products, interesting blogs, juicy rumours and heated debates on mailing lists in the comments down below. You can also contact me in the IRC channel, my nickname there is DaftDog. Oh, and I will keep future issues of the PloneBuzz much shorter than this, I promise (there might be the odd special coming up every once in a while though)!
]]>The main goal of PloneBuzz is to connect people a bit more so that they don't miss out on important discussions, new products or packages and to minimize redundancies in Product development (I suppose many of us have this "Why are there so many Products doing X but none of 'em do it properly? I wish the developers had joined forces and created something really good..."-moment once in a while). To achieve this I will post lots of links to news group archives, Products, blogs, stuff on OpenPlans and contact info in case you should be interested in giving feedback to product managers or champions, or even to join the project.
Since I attended the Sorrento sprint I thought it would be a good idea to start with a round-up of the things that went off there, and the related discussions on the lists. In the future I am planning to establish a certain structure for the news items which I will explain in the next issue because this one is going to be a little long anyway and I won't keep to the structure for now (after all it's a "Special", right?). These news items are supposed to be rather short and if time permits there will be an equally short, accompanying, 10-12 minute Podcast in the future, watch this space for more info on that.
So hold on to your hats, the first issue is just around the corner!
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