This Month in Plone — May 2010

As the clock counts down to the release of a brand new Plone 4, events take center stage for the Plone community. World Plone Day just finished demoing Plone to the planet, Plone is represented at next week’s CMS Expo in Chicago, and regional Plone conferences are taking place on both sides of the Atlantic at the end of May — at Penn State University in the U.S, and Sorrento, Italy.

In this month’s issue

 

 

Plone 4.0 Beta 2 Release Out and Now in Testing

The second beta release of the Plone 4 cycle was made available to developers on April 13 and by all reports is showing significant performance improvements.  The release of binary installers means that anyone can install Plone 4 on a test machine and see what the fuss is all about.

We need your help to test this pre-release version of Plone and report bugs!  If you'd like to help, you can either:

  • Download binary installers for Windows and Macintosh or the Unified Installer from http://plone.org/products/plone/releases/4.0
  • If you already have an earlier release of Plone 4 installed, just update your buildout.cfg to the most recent release and re-run buildout.

Note: Plone 4 beta 2 is still in testing, and we don't recommend that you install it on production servers!

Cathedral Sprint 2010: A Resounding Success

Over 25 Plone developers from around the world met in the offices of GfU Cyrus PLC in Cologne March 15-19th for a week of intensive work on Plone.

Thanks to a video conference link to the Tahoe Snow Sprint Team in the USA the work continued almost around the clock. Matthew Wilkes from Bristol found the meet-up to be "extremely productive." The Cathedral Sprint was organized by the Rheinland group of the German Zope User group (DZUG e.V). For the third time Jan Ulrich Hasecke secured GfU Cyrus AG as the sponsor of a Zope Sprint. As well as training for all aspects of IT GfU offers seminars on Python, Zope, Plone and Grok. ACSR developed the Sprint-Logo and supported the team on location.

The results of the sprint included:

  • Reimplementation of collections
  • Search improvements
  • Event upgrades
  • Improved Content Browsing
  • New content migration strategy for Plone 4
  • Translations into German and Dutch for Plone 4
  • Plone Discussion - a new commenting engine with moderation
  • Work on a new calendar widget
  • Performance improvements with handling large images and a complete revamp of image scaling

Thanks to Jan Ulrich Hasecke, Armin Carl Stroß-Radshinski and Geir Bækholt for their help with this post.

Plone featured at CMS Expo - May 3 to 5 in Evanston, IL (USA)

A number of Plone community leaders will be participating in a learning track exclusively devoted to Plone at this year's CMS Expo in Evanston, IL and educating potential users along with other CMS industry heavyweights Drupal, Joomla! and Wordpress.

This marks the first year Plone has its own track at this event.  The Plone track at the 2010 CMS Expo is sponsored by the Plone Foundation, Enfold Systems and Contextual Corporation.  This dedicated track will include three full days of talks, case studies and interactive discussions on Plone by:

CMS Expo is a 3-day conference for business professionals and users to compare the top open source CMSes for business, head-to-head. In addition, the CMS Expo is designed to be an empowering event to help web professionals at all skill levels to achieve more - and do it faster and smarter - with the help of an incredibly open and supportive community.  Founders from the leading open source CMS projects will speak, in addition to participating on several interactive panels.

The Plone Foundation is sponsoring an information booth at the event to answer questions from attendees and provide them with more information about Plone and how it can meet their needs.

Find out more about CMS Expo 2010 here.

Plone Symposium East 2010 - May 24 to 30 in State College, PA (USA)

Symposium East 2010 on the campus of Penn State University is less than a month away, and is offering a busy week of training, talks and sprints addressing most every aspect of community interest.  The event is hosted by Weblion,an initiative to provide add-on products, consulting, training, and community around the Plone content management system at Penn State.

Dr. Chuck Severance of the University of Michigan will give the keynote for Day 1, The University As A Cloud: Openness in Education. It will explore strategic opportunities for higher education in the near future and the importance of applying "open" principles across the educational enterprise.

Eric Steele, WebLion Programmer-Analyst and Release Manager for Plone 4, will deliver the Day 2 keynote, Plone 4 and Beyond.  Eric will showcase features of Plone 4, which is due to be released in early summer of 2010, and will preview changes planned for future Plone releases.

There is still space available for this event, including training sessions.  You can find out more by visiting the symposium website -  including a full listing of event talks, sprints and birds-or-a-feather sessions being planned.

European Plone Symposium 2010 May 26 - 30 in Sorrento, Italy

The second annual European Plone Symposium will be held in Sorrento, Italy this year - offering attendees five days of talks, discussions and sprints sponsored by Abstract http://www.abstract.it/.

You can find out more about the Symposium by visiting the Sorrento event page.

Sponsorship Opportunities for Plone Conference 2010 Now Available

Bristol is this years proud host of the Plone conference 2010. We have managed to secure a fantastic city centre venue and have an exciting programme of events and talks planned.

The annual Plone conference is only made possible with the help and support of the community and sponsors of the event. We hope to make this years conference one of the most comprehensive, remarkable gatherings of Plone followers to date but we need your support.

There are a number of sponsorship packages available suiting all budgets, from our main platinum conference package through to smaller opportunities such as our supporting sponsorship.

Become a proud sponsor of Bristol's 2010 Plone conference and choose from one of these packages at the Plone Conference 2010 Sponsorship page.

New Plone websites we like

University of Washington

The University of Washington recently relaunched their main website with Plone.  Its a clean, dynamic design and showcases what talented people can build with Plone.  Not only has the UW web team launched a beautiful, high-traffic site, they've been blogging about the process at http://depts.washington.edu/uweb/blog/ where their experience and learnings can benefit others.  Congratulations to the UW web team on a job well done!

Waste Recycling Environmental Limited (WREN) and North Somerset Council

WREN  and North Somerset Council both recently launched beautiful, functional Plone-based websites with the help of Open Communications Design Ltd in Bristol UK.  In addition to both being attractive, easy to navigate sites, they are also showcases of design using XDV, the next generation website theming technology that will come into broad usage with the upcoming release of Plone 4.

Ben Guest, from Open, had this to say about their experience with using XDV on web projects: "XDV has been a revolutionary technology for Open. It's enabled front-end development to happen independently, requiring no Plone knowledge. This means concurrent development, total creative freedom, better HTML output and the ability to use of a broader base of developers. There are some limitations when tying in the theme, but nothing that can't be resolved with a CSS tweak, jbot, or in few cases, some minimal XSLT. XDV has streamlined our Plone development workflow and slashed costs. We're looking forward to documenting our experience and contributing to the project."