Plone 3.0 Release Candidate available for all platforms

The Plone Team today announced the Release Candidate build of the upcoming Plone 3.0 release for all platforms. Please take a few minutes and read this message to see how you can help make Plone 3.0 even better and make it easier for yourself to upgrade. And add-on product authors: now is the time to start updating your products and verifying that they work on Plone 3.0!

Plone 3.0 is a result of over 9 months of hard work by the "Plone Team":/about/team, and has a lot of exciting new features. There will be a proper presentation of the new features made available when the final release is out, but some notable new features are: - Full versioning, roll-back capabilities, in-place staging (ie. working copy support) and locking for all content. - Inline editing of content using Ajax. - Link integrity checking (stops you from accidentally breaking references between documents) and automatic handling of moved/renamed content — both of which work together to eliminate broken links in your site. - Several new workflows examples/presets included by default: - Simple Web Publishing workflow - Intranet workflow - Community Site workflow - Content rules engine. - Wiki support. - New portlets infrastructure and management UI. - "OpenID":http://openid.net/ authentication support. - Much-improved user interface for the sharing page, comprehensive control panel reorganization. - New dedicated Contributor/Reader/Editor roles, as well as a "logged in users" pseudogroup. - An additional new theme "NuPlone" "The full list of Plone 3.0 features":/products/plone/features/3.0 is available, and the inimitable Jon Stahl also has an article called "8 Really Cool Things About Plone 3":http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/2007/07/16/8-really-cool-things-about-plone-3/ if you want a more in-depth walk-through of some of those features. "Download":img:/platform_all_platforms.gif "Download Plone 3.0 Release Candidate here!":/products/plone/releases/3.0 How can you help make Plone 3.0 even better? 1. Help us test the new functionality, with special attention to the list above. "Report Plone 3.0 bugs here":http://dev.plone.org/plone. 2. Help us test third-party products — add-on products are crucial to the perceived quality of Plone, since so many people use them — and we'd like as many products as possible to be tested and updated to work with Plone 3's exciting new features. Report bugs to the author, see below. 3. Help us translate! An often overlooked aspect of quality is the quality of the translations of a product. Check out how Plone looks in your language, and "submit translation bugs":/products/plonetranslations/issues if something seems out-of-place or just plain wrong. Or even better, help us add a new language that isn't supported yet! Below, we have summarized some additional details on how to help: Site admins and customizers/integrators We need your help with: - "Downloading and testing the Plone 3.0 installers":/download. - Testing the new features. - Testing upgrades from **your** real-life — and properly backed up ;) — Plone 2.1.x and 2.5.x instances. Plone 2.0 and 1.0 instances have to upgrade to at least Plone 2.1 or 2.5 before they can be moved to 3.0. New for Plone 3.0 is a comprehensive upgrade manual located at "http://plone.org/upgrade":http://plone.org/upgrade. This also means that the manual still has some rough edges, leave comments and help us improve it! - Testing the add-on products you are using, and reporting any issues to the maintainer and the "Product Developer list":http://www.nabble.com/Product-Developers-f20094.html, so it can be fixed in time for the final release of Plone 3.0. It's in your best interest to test a migration of **your** instance and the products **you are using**, since that will make it easier for you to upgrade when the final release is out. Add-on product developers We need your help with: - Testing your product on Plone 3.0. - Making new releases of your product if necessary, so people have a version that works on Plone 3.0. - Reporting any problems not mentioned in the "upgrade guide":/upgrade. We have tried collecting all the relevant error messages and update notices you may encounter — and how to fix them in your product — in the "Upgrading your product to 3.0":/documentation/manual/upgrade-guide/version/2.5-3.0/products part of the upgrade documentation. If you need help with upgrading your add-on product to work with Plone 3.0, please post your questions in the "Add-on product development forum":http://www.nabble.com/Product-Developers-f20094.html