First Plone 2.5 Alpha Released

The Plone team is proud to announce an initial public preview of the upcoming Plone 2.5 release, which focuses on infrastructural changes.

Fresh from the snowy peaks of Egg, Austria, where Plonistas from around the world have come together for the 3rd annual Plone Snow Sprint, comes a first look at the next Plone.  We invite you to see what's in store for the upcoming release of Plone.  New features in this alpha include:

  • The ability to use Zope3 MessageIDs in Plone; this is now the official mechanism for performing translations from python code. (plip)
  • Status messages are no longer passed via query strings, but provided by a Zope3 style global utility which allows for translating messages and displaying multiple messages resulting from a given user action. (plip)
  • Plone now includes CMFPlacefulWorkflow, which allows type->workflow mappings to be configured independently in different places in your portal. (plip)

Features under development and expected in later alpha releases include:

  • Replacement of the default authentication mechanism (GroupUserFolder) with a pluggable/extensible system using PAS/PlonePAS. (plip)
  • Replacing the current python site creation mechanisms with an XML driven portal setup using GenericSetup. (plip)
  • Replacing some python scripts, tool methods, and utility templates with Zope3 Browser Views. (plips 105 and 106)

What's important now is that you help us by doing the following:

  • Install/upgrade backups of your instances to Plone 2.5 and report any migration problems or bugs in the Issue Tracker - the more sites you can attempt migrating, the more likely it is that we can make your site migrate properly when the final release is out.
  • Test the alpha on as many setups as you can, and report any problems back to us.
  • Test your products with the 2.5 alpha, if you are a third-party developer, and update your code to make use of the new 2.5 facilities that will make it faster and more scalable. Help is available on the Developer list for product authors.
  • Contact the authors of the above PLIPs if you would like to help complete or debug any of the above features.

This new release may be downloaded from the official 2.5 release page.

— Alec Mitchell (on behalf of the Plone Team)