Proposals for Plone 4 solicited

The Plone Foundation is pleased to announce that the Plone 4 Framework Team will, starting immediately, consider community proposals for substantive improvements to the Plone platform.

A Plone Improvement Proposal, or PLIP, is a detailed description of an improvement to Plone that goes above and beyond a normal bug fix.  Changes that significantly alter backwards compatibility, visuals or APIs are only permitted as PLIPs for a major release; any such proposal not entered in this round would have to wait until Plone 5 in order to be considered.  Anyone can submit a PLIP but you should only submit a PLIP if you intend to either do the work yourself or take responsibility for finding people who will.

Plone 4 is intended to be an intermediate release between the very stable Plone 3 and more experimental improvements planned to become available within the next few years.  The primary focus is on bringing Plone up to date with newer technologies while making the platform easier to use for integrators and end-users.  Although the release schedule is not yet fixed, the final version is likely to be released at the end of this year.

Submissions opened on the 9th of June, 2009, and will remain open until 0700 UTC on the 22nd of June, 2009. Any PLIPs submitted to the old system on plone.org should be resubmitted to the new location for consideration.

If you have a feature that you're willing to take responsibility for:

Go to the PLIP template and follow the instructions there to submit a new PLIP. You need a plone.org account to do this.

If you have an idea for something that Plone should do, but can't commit resources to it:

Add your idea to the new service we are testing for idea collection and rating.

Once you finish writing your proposal, set the milestone to "4.0" so the team knows to give you feedback.  Once the submission deadline passes, the Framework Team will vote on the submissions and set an implementation deadline.  A feature can only be included in Plone 4 if both the proposal and implementation are approved by the framework team.

A PLIP should include information on why a change is important, how it will be achieved, and an analysis of any downsides to it being adopted. Further help in writing PLIPs can be found in the core developer forum or by asking in the #plone-framework IRC channel on Freenode.