Plone Status Update, May 2003

A status update of Zope/CMF/Plone/Archetypes and some information about Plone at various conferences.

It's June, and we have just released the Plone 1.0.2 tarball and Windows installer. The packages for the other platforms will trickle in during the next days. A lot of work has been going on in the Lands of Zope/CMF/Plone/Archetypes, so we would like to update you on the status of "all things Zope". Zope 2.6.2 should be out very soon. Some of the core data structures used in Zope (BTrees) have been hardened, and made more resilient to errors. There was also a nasty bug in the "pack" of the ZODB that has been cleared up. Zope2.6.2 will most likely be the last release before Zope2.7. Note that you *will* have to recompile the 2.6.2 version of Zope to make use of the new BTree changes, since they are written in C. Tres, Yvo and the other CMF committers have done amazing work, and released CMF 1.4 last week. One of the biggest changes made was the unification of portal_type Actions and ActionTypeInformation (ATI) objects. ATI are actions that you can put on most of your tools are are used in Plone for such things as buttons on folder_contents and tabs where as portal_type actions were specific to portal_type. They are now unified and actions now need to be valid TALES expressions such as "string:document_edit_form" instead of "document_edit_form". In Plone we used to have /portal_form/ in our actions - this is fixed - you can now specify things just like you would normally do in CMF, "string:document_edit_form", as it's the job of the template to munge the URL. Also new in CMF 1.4, the '.metadata' files on the filesystem now allow you to put attributes on filesystem objects as well as put security assertions on templates, scripts and files. Finally, CSS files are now normal files instead of DTML objects. Plone 1.0.2 is a maintenance release with some minor features added (for instance if you don't have permissions to view content it says "you have insufficient privileges" instead of sending you to the login_form), and there are a lot of minor bug fixes, so 1.0.2 is much more pleasant to work with. Read the HISTORY file for more information. 1.0.2 is not compatible with CMF 1.4, but is compatible with CMF 1.3.1 and below. The reason for this is that 1.1 will support CMF 1.4 anyway, and we prefer to be a bit conservative with the 1.0 series of releases. The big news is, of course, Plone 1.1 - well on its way to see the light of day. Plone 1.1 will be compatible with (and require) CMF 1.4. The plan is to ship it with Zope 2.6.2 and include more Zope Products such as Casey Duncan's amazing ExternalEditor, Shane Hathaway's BTreeFolder2, Lalo's PlacelessTranslationService and possibly Ben Saller's Archetypes project. Limi and Geir have cleaned up the templates majorly - they are now squeaky clean. Please note that this will affect you if you did heavy customizations to main_template or header. We chose to to this change in 1.1 and not 1.0.x, so people have a grace period to update their templates. It is worth it, and we're generally just changing these two templates, the rest of your customizations should work just fine. It is very much a required change, and we would like to do this as early in the game as possible. We will also be using Tres's ActionIconTool that is in cvs.zope.org and possibly ship with a simple version of CMFStaging. There is a lot of cleanup work to do in Plone 1.1 still and heaps of functionality (such as user administration) has not landed yet. The upside is: for developers CVS HEAD of Plone is currently stable and can be used for development (but not deployment just yet ;). Tons of people have contributed to the 1.1 release. We need more people testing Plone 1.1, so we will start generating nightly tarballs in the weeks ahead. Currently needed: - User administration from inside the Plone interface - People helping us test HEAD of CVS - Section 508 and WAI compliancy testing (some people have offered to help, but we need more people on this its a mundane task that anyone who has time can help out with) check out "http://checky.mozdev.org":http://checky.mozdev.org - developers seeing if their products work as expected with Plone 1.1. - Cleaning the collector (we have 200 issues there now) - atleast 50 to 100 of these could be cleared out pretty easily - some are documentation issues, some are duplicates and others are very minor problems. Archetypes is still not at 1.0 ;-) There has been a huge upsurge of interest in Archetypes. Several people have CMFMember in production use (it's really cool - members are content, you can workflow them etc). There has been an Archetypes release, 0.99.1 and even a "quick reference" manual written by Sidnei da Silva in the "documentation section":/documentation at plone.org. It seems the final piece that Ben is waiting for before he declares a 1.0 release is the transform tool (allows you to plugin transformation policies for content) - some of you may have seen the demos we have given at sprints where you can upload Word documents and have it transformed into HTML using PyUNO. This is great software - give it a go: "http://sf.net/projects/archetypes":http://sf.net/projects/archetypes Thanks to everyone who has made Plone a reality and to those who keep evangelizing it. We are making more of an effort at recognizing all of the testers, writers, documenters, #plone helpers, developers, and patrons. Plone has been written up in eWeek, Linux Journal, several projects at this years OSCOM are using Plone - Plone is definitely finding its niche. Commerical support infrastructure is being developed. EuroPython will have several Plone presentations and happenings. The O'Reilly conference will have a presentation by Andy McKay who will give a Plone overview. Hopefully there will be several BoF sessions and we can get live feedback from users about their experiences with Plone. We hope to see as many as possible on these conferences, Alexander Limi and Benjamin Saller are confirmed for "EuroPython":http://www.europython.org and as mentioned, Andy McKay will be presenting at the "O'Reilly":http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2003/ conference. Plone 1.1 is shaping up to be a solid release with important new features - we know you won't be disappointed. **The Plone Team**