The Month in Plone: June 2009
June was a busy month for the Plone project. Here’s a summary of progress and upcoming events.
Next Major Plone Release Separated into Plone 4 and Plone 5
The biggest news at the recent Plone Symposium at Penn State was a major revision to the Plone Roadmap, presented as part of the keynote by Plone Founder Alexander Limi.
Plone 4 had been slated for release in 2010 as a comprehensive update of the Plone product featuring some major changes to the UI paradigm, a new theming method, and myriad changes under the hood. In the keynote, Limi announced the split of this release into a smaller, more focused release — Plone 4 — and a longer term, more radical release — Plone 5.
Plone 4 will feature upgrades to Zope 2.12, CMF 2.2, Python 2.6, addition of the widely used TinyMCE editor, built-in BLOB support, improved upgrade machinery, new flexible roles and permissions, as well as improvements to commments and workflows — as well as a brand new default theme. He also announced the selection of Penn State University's Eric Steele as the release manager for Plone 4. Plone 4 is due out in late 2009.
Plone 5 will be a major upgrade to Plone focused on three goals — end-user simplicity, developer approachability and performance. It will introduce a number of brand new technologies to Plone — the current proposal includes through-the-web schema editing, a completely new way of theming Plone with Deliverance/xdv, and the possible addition of Grok-like directives to Plone to reduce the need for ZCML. The new plone.registry will allow for portal configuration in a manner similar to Mozilla's about:config.
Limi went in-depth on plans to pare down the Plone code base and improve its speed in Plone 5, and how this can be complimented with improvements to search, including the use of Solr/Lucene for enterprise deployments. Two brand new technologies — known as Deco and Tiles — showed those in attendance just how revolutionary the change in interfaces for editing and managing content will be in Plone 5. This will include folding content into just one content type — removing the artificial separation between a page, a folder and a collection.
Plone 5 is being managed by release manager Hanno Schlichting, who was release manager for Plone 4 before the change was announced.
The full presentation from Limi's talk at the Penn State Symposium is available, and you can also consult the Plone roadmap for more details on the upcoming releases.
User feedback system launched
Have a great idea for how to improve Plone? We've now got a new tool to let you suggest, discuss and vote on ideas!
Thanks to some great work by Martin "optilude" Aspeli, we've launched an "ideas" system for Plone, which allows the wider Plone user community to suggest, discuss and vote on ideas for improving Plone.
We're not just listening to developers and integrators, but looking for input from users and site administrators to give everyone in the Plone community a chance to influence Plone to better meet their needs.
Plone users: we enthusiastically encourage you to submit ideas about how to improve Plone, and to vote on and discuss existing ideas. We can't promise that every idea will be implemented, but we will certainly use the ideas system to understand what Plone users want to see added and improved.
To submit, discuss and vote on ideas for Plone, head on over to http://plone.uservoice.com.
Plone contributors: if you're eager to make Plone better, but don't know where to start, please check out the ideas system to find out what's most "in demand."
For more information, including some frequently asked questions about the new ideas system, and how it complements our existing PLIP (PLone Improvement Proposal) system, see our new FAQ "How to suggest a feature for Plone." Read the original announcement…
Google Summer of Code Update
For the fourth consecutive year, the Plone Foundation is participating in Google's Summer of Code program, this year mentoring 7 students to help them improve Plone.
This year's students are currently hard at work on on Atom Publication Protocol support, e-commerce, ontologies, PloneFormGen, better support for large folders and the commenting infrastructure, on a range of projects that will benefit both users of Plone 3 and users of the next major revision, Plone 4.
These 7 projects represent an investment of $35,000 in the development of Plone by Google, a significant part of the over $95,000 provided to Plone since the inception of the Summer of Code initiative. While the majority of this money goes as a stipend to the participating students, Google has also donated over $10,000 directly to the Plone Foundation.
This year's students and mentors are:
| Student | Topic | Mentor |
|---|---|---|
| Chelsea Bingiel | Atom Publishing Protocol | Matthew Wilkes |
| Michael Mulich | Atom Publishing Protocol | Kevin Kalupson |
| Derek Richardson | GetPaid payment architecture | Brandon Craig Rhodes |
| Matthew Lange | Pluggable ontologies | Raphael Ritz |
| Quyet Nguyen Duc | PloneFormGen improvements | Steve McMahon |
| Sean Upton | Large Folder UI/scalability | Carsten Senger |
| Timo Stollenwerk | Commenting improvements | Martin Aspeli |
The Plone community is fortunate to have such a talented group of students and mentors for Summer of Code 2009, and we tremendously appreciate all of your efforts to make Plone even more excellent. And, as always, thanks to the folks at Google for making Summer of Code possible!
Plone Conference 2009 reminder — Budapest, Oct 26 - Nov 1
Plone Conference 2009 is being organized by Greenfinity and Open Society Institute, who will be releasing information on conference details — as well as a call for presentations — in the next few weeks.
Notable Site Launches in June 2009
Jazkarta launches a new Plone site for Oxfam America
Read the blog entry about how the site was put together
Vienna.info launches on Plone, a site in 12 languages, showcasing Plone's excellent multilingual support
Upcoming Training and Events
Six Feet Up Offers Immersive Training Experience - Benefiting Non-Profit with a New Website
Indianapolis, Indiana, September 2009
Six Feet Up will host a "Plone Immersive Training Experience" that will take attendees through the hands-on and guided exercise of creating and launching a real Plone site from scratch. The event will be designed to engage participants in real problem-solving activities spanning from the initial Subversion setup and buildout creation, to the stimulating task of skinning a Plone site for multiple platforms and browsers, setup of third-party Plone products, and the final deployment to the production server with the setup of caching rules.
To give meaning to the project and foster attention, attendees will be working on a real Plone project, a website for the Winton Woods Educational Foundation (WWEF) in Cincinnati, Ohio. They were chosen by a public vote from a group of 19 organizations who applied. WWEF was formed to support and enhance the academic success of the Winton Woods City School District. Accessible to students and educators, the Foundation will provide assistance for those programs and activities that fall outside traditional funding sources. This is vitally important at this time due to the lack of school funding.
The Plone Immersive Training event will heavily rely on the on-site presence of 14 Mentors hand-picked for their experience working with Plone and their leadership skills. The Mentors will be directing a dozen workshops dedicated to core sets of components inherent to any common Plone development projects.
The Plone Immersive Training Experience will take place in Indianapolis, IN, over the course of a little bit less than 3 days, starting on Thursday, Sept. 10th at 9am, and ending 60 hours later on Saturday, Sept. 12th at 9pm. During that time participants will literally live, breathe and taste Plone in an instructional setting focused on learning by experience.
More about Six Feet Up's Immersive Training…
Plone Bootcamps courses in Chapel Hill, NC
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA, July 2009
In the basic bootcamp, students will learn the essentials you need to build your Plone site and deploy it. This course is the most popular in the Plone world--for a good reason: it teaches you practical skills in a friendly, hands-on format. Updated for Plone 3.1 and 3.2, while still offering the core skills required for all versions of Plone.
The basic bootcamp is offered to the general public, and is aimed at:
- people with HTML or web design experience
- people with some or no Python experience
- people with some or no Zope/Plone experience
This is a hands-on, interactive class. It covers using Plone, customizing, and deploying Plone sites.
The advanced bootcamp is offered to developers and covers the new technologies in Plone 3.1 and 3.2 intended for site integrators and developers: our new portlet infrastructure, viewlets, versioning, and a friendly introduction to Zope 3 component architecture.
Redomino Plone 3 Basic Training
Torino, Italy, July 2009
A one day training session focused on the perspective of the content editor: adding, editing, publishing and managing content with Plone.
More information on the Redomino Plone training…
Plone 3 CMS Training by CIGNEX
Santa Clara, California, USA, August 2009
This course is designed for both the content managers and developers. This is a 3 day hands-on session covering the latest offerings of Plone 3.0 like Content Versioning, Pluggable Authentication Service (PAS), Content Rules Engine, Portlets Engine, Buildout etc. Participants will get Latest training material, Course completion Certificate, a CD with code samples.
More information on the Cignex Plone training…
Ingeniweb: Plone Training
Paris, France, September 2009
A training in Paris, lead by an Ingeniweb expert, for understanding Plone configuration and integration practices.
More information on the Ingeniweb Plone training…
Help us with material for next month’s issue
Do you have any notable news, upcoming site launches or anything else relevant to the next edition of The Month in Plone? Send an email to monthly@plone.org.