Plone 4.3 Released

Features Dexterity, In-Plone Theme Editor, Lots More

Download Plone 4.3:

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We’re happy to announce the release of Plone 4.3! This release includes the much-anticipated Dexterity and In-Plone Theme Editor, along with lots of other features and improvements.

“The In-Plone Theme Editor and Dexterity take us a long way toward the goal of making Plone simple to customize and theme” says Release Manager Eric Steele. “They’re a critical step in Plone’s evolution. 4.3 also includes a lot of smaller yet significant improvements -- we’ve revamped underused tools to make them more helpful, and we’ve backed out  a couple of unused and outdated features.”

What’s New in 4.3

Dexterity Content Type Framework

A recent alternative to Archetypes, Dexterity provides the ability to create new content types through the web and switch on and off behaviors on a per-type basis -- so, no more need to build add-on content-type products or “clone” content types in the ZMI. Dexterity also makes collaboration easier between integrators (who can define a type's schema, for example) and programmers (who can provide reusable behaviors as add-ons).

Developers can use Dexterity to create content types using less boilerplate and repetition than with Archetypes and CMF types. They also can create content objects with a smaller runtime footprint, thus improving performance.

Read more about Dexterity:

• Documentation

In-Plone Theme Editor

With the aim of making Plone the world’s easiest CMS to theme, the In-Plone Theme Editor uses Diazo to make it possible for designers to create themes without touching Python, Buildout, or the file system at all.

Diazo-built themes can be downloaded and distributed as Zip files, so site administrators can reuse and share them. Integrators can further enhance these thems and turn them into add-on products, if necessary.

The In-Plone Theme Editor is the product of much usability testing and collaboration with end-users. Learn more about some of the UI work that has gone into this feature.

Improved Syndication

This includes the following significant enhancements:

• Syndication now supports Atom and iTunes feed formats along with RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0.

• Syndication settings are now managed in the Plone control panel. Site integrators can...
  ...disable the search feed RSS (search_rss)
  ...select which feed types are available
  ...enable/disable syndication settings button portal action
  ...enable/disable syndication link portal action
  ...override and customize feed rendering and provide customized feeds.

• The skin layer related RSS and syndication settings is now in views.

• Feed rendering now respects the setting for "Allow anyone to view 'about' information" for the author field in a feed item so that site integrators can prevent usernames and related information from being published without customizing the template.

• More improvements to Plone’s syndication...

Updated TinyMCE

Plone now uses TinyMCE 3.4, with improved support for Internet Explorer. This version of TinyMCE features a simplified browser for links and images and is compatible with Dexterity.

Improved Content Rules User Interface

The new Content Rules UI uses overlays and AJAX to make it simpler to create and edit content rules, enable/disable rules, and apply a rule to the root of the site. Site managers also can now filter content rules.

DateTime Optimizations

Changes to the storage methods of DateTime data improve Plone’s memory footprint by 10-20%.

Page Bylines Show the Publication Date if it Exists

A small but nice feature that is useful to site visitors and content managers.

Plain-Text Searches Now Ignore Accents

This improves search results. For example, a search for econometrie should return content containing économétrie -- and now it does.

z3c.form Support to plone.app.portlets

This allows portlet forms to be built using Plone's preferred form library.

Unified Batch Implementation

This reduces the previous three batching implementations into one. This makes it easier to maintain a common user interface and improve usability. It also makes integration simpler when developing add-on products.

A New API for Password-Validation Policy

This allows easy integration of alternative password strength rules into Plone.

No Longer Shipped in Plone 4.3

• Kupu WYSIWYG editor as part of Plone core
  Those wishing to use Kupu must now explicity require Products.kupu in their buildouts.

• Kinetic Style Sheets (KSS) support
  Existing functionality has been migrated to use jQuery instead. Add-ons relying on KSS may include it by depending on plone.app.kss.

Download Plone 4.3 here.