Please help us test Plone 4 alpha releases!

Plone 4 is coming with a lot of new features and improvements! But we can't find and squash its bugs without your help. Please help us improve Plone 4 by downloading and testing our “alpha 3” release. This release is only for testing purposes and is not suitable for production environments.

Plone 4.0 is currently at its third alpha release, and we need your help to test this pre-production release in order to help us find and squash its remaining bugs.

Disclaimer

Plone 4.0 alpha 3 is a testing release, and is not suitable for production environments.  Do not upgrade your live Plone site to Plone 4.0 alpha 3, or any pre-release version of Plone.

Here's the list of improvements and tickets associated with Plone 4.0. 

Here's how you can help make Plone 4.0 a solid and stable release:

  • Download a Plone 4.0a3 and install it on your workstation or in a test environment.  (Do not use Plone 4.0a3 in a live production environment!)
  • Test Plone 4.0a3's features old and new as thoroughly as you can.
  • Test your favorite add-on products with Plone 4.0a3.
  • Take a copy (not the original!) of one of your real-world Data.fs files, and try migrating it to Plone 4.0a3.  
  • Report any bugs you find either to the Plone team or to the appropriate add-on product author.

Installation

Using the Unified Installer

You can download the Plone 4.0a3 Unified Installer for *nix, Mac OS X and BSD systems, which includes Python 2.6, Zope and Plone in a convenient bundle (binary installer for Windows coming soon). Just unpack it and follow the instructions in the README.txt file included.

Using paster to generate the buildout skeleton

This can be a good option if you're a developer and you understand well how buildout works.

You can generate valid Plone 4 buildout environments using paster and ZopeSkel:

# easy_install -U ZopeSkel ... $ paster create -t plone3_buildout plone4a3 ... Enter plone_version (Which Plone version to install) ['3.3.2']: 4.0a3 ...

Plone 4 runs on Python 2.6, so just use it to run bootstrap.py:

$ python2.6 bootstrap.py $ bin/buildout ... $ bin/instance fg

Reporting bugs

If you find any bugs or other issues:

  1. Search the Plone bugtracker to check if your bug has already been reported.
  2. If it hasn't already been reported, file a new ticket. Double check you select Milestone: 4.0 and an appropriate component. Include as much info as possible so we can verify the bug (what operating system, which setup you installed, steps to reproduce the bug, etc)

Note that this is a new Plone release that includes significant changes, but is designed to be a smooth upgrade from the Plone 3.x series.

If you find any add-on products that work with Plone 3.x, but do not work with Plone 4.0  please report these bugs to the appropriate add-on product owners (see plone.org/products for info on where to file bugs for add-on products).

About Plone testing releases

If you're not already familiar with the Plone release cycle, here's a quick primer:  before we make a "final, ready for production" release, we make several "alpha" releases, which may be missing some features, and are definitely still buggy, but need community testing in order to help us find and squash bugs.  Then, we start making "beta" releases, which are feature-complete and hopefully only moderately buggy. The community pounds away on these, and once we think we've squashed all of the bugs, we make one more more "release candidate" releases, which we encourage folks to test intensively.  After that, we make a "final" release, which is recommended for use in production by everyone.