Conference Session

Collective Good: Best Practices for Creating, Releasing and Maintaining Add-on Products for Plone

By: Jon Baldivieso

About Jon Baldivieso

A Senior Developer at ONE/Northwest, I've been working with on Plone since we adopted it in late 2003. I've had a hand in about a third of the 130 or so Plone sites ONE/Northwest has deployed. I've created or assisted in the maintenance of some of ONE/Northwest's more popular Products: Scrawl, Press Room, Slideshow Folder. In terms of presentation credentials, I co-presented at the 2006 Plone Symposium, (New Orleans), served on a panel at the 2006 Plone Conference (Seattle), and cofounded and presented multiple times at the Portland Plone User Group.

About the session

Because the add on story is such an important selling point for Plone, I intend to talk about the elements going into creating and maintaining them properly. For the purposes of this talk, about half of this is a list of pretty standard, but very important, coding bullet points (write tests, reuse standard Plone CSS classes, i18n, etc). The other half is process-based: asking the critical questions before deciding to release a Product, release cycle details, svn process, documenting properly, supporting Plone versions predictably, maintaining PSC entries and issue trackers, etc. An outgrowth of this talk would be updating/augmenting existing documentation in plone.org about the process of releasing code.

I'll be drawing on ONE/Northwest's collective experience with our suite of released products for examples of good practices and bad. Writing code for add on most products is in some ways different from writing code for the Plone's framework, which is what much of the documentation one finds is written for. This is something I'll be pointing out throughout the talk.This is a Talk (45 min)