Plone Team Leaders’ Report, July 2013

This way for more information about our teams and how to get involved.

Accessibility

Paul Roeland

The accessibility team is constituting itself! Several people have indicated they want to join.

At PSM13, we had a sprint dedicated to accessibility: We made several improvements and looked at remaining issues. These issues can easily be fixed, but it would entail incompatible changes to a number of templates that are better scheduled for a major version upgrade.

Thanks to work done by Asko Soukka, automated accessibility testing is now possible for a range of a11y issues, and, we hope, more in the future (contrast, color-blindness, ...). This will allow a11y to become a first-class citizen in our testing culture.

We want to provide documentation to both Plone core and add-on developers on how to implement best practices and testing for a11y issues.

Work was also done to connect with the UI team and to check the new patterns/mockup/plone.app.ui developments.

We can still use help! Contact a11y@plone.org if you are interested.

Communications

Rose Pruyne

We are looking for members of the Plone community interested in writing and editing news articles and press releases for Plone. If you are interested, please contact Rose Pruyne, rpruyne@gmail.com.

Confirmed membership of 4 writer/editors:

  • Kim Nguyen, Oshkosh
  • Heidi Reinke, Oshkosh
  • Chris Thomas, Penn State
  • Christina McNeill, Penn State

    Plus, Paul Roeland and others contribute lots and lots.

Articles in progress:

  • Security Team (What they do; how the community can help)
  • Accessibility Team’s Work & Plone’s WCAG 2.0 Compliance
  • Profile of KK Dhanesh
  • German Security Study of CMS
  • plone.api

Framework

Eric Steele

The Framework Team has decided to forego Plone 4.4 in favor of moving on to Plone 5. This should allow for a much simpler integration and upgrade story. Development is progressing steadily and I feel confident that we can get Plone 5 out by the end of next summer. The Foundation Board has funded $25,000 in strategic sprinting this year, which we've been using to integrate new developers and push forward the big projects for Plone 5. This money does not exist for next year, so we need to focus outreach efforts on fundraising if we want to continue this.  

From a personal standpoint, I'm focusing on more community leadership in addition to my release management duties, this meeting being the start of that effort. I'll be soliciting for a small team of developers to help me do the packaging as needed. We'll be working closely with the Testing & Automation and Installers Teams to try to automate some of the more repetitive portions of making releases and to try to streamline the process as much as possible.

Installer

Steve McMahon

Installers are in great shape at this moment with the renewal of the Windows installer thanks to Giacomo Spetelli.

The installer team should also probably take responsibility for the skeleton generator. We need to work on getting Templer (or an equivalent) ready by Plone 5 with better integration with buildout.

The Vagrant kits for base and core developers are a nice addition to what we have available. Vagrant works!

Marketing

Eric Rosenboom

During the PSM13 marketing sprint, we completed a lot of work that will help define a thorough strategic marketing plan. Eric is currently working out the details and expects a first draft to be available within the next few weeks. The plan will include proposals for tag-lines and short statements, including a brief message (elevator pitch) to support these statements. The draft marketing plan will be send to a small, dedicated group of people for review and comments, after which we will finalize the plan. This dedicated group includes the board of the Plone Foundation and those who have explicitly demonstrated positive involvement and contribution with regard to marketing.

Near the end of August is the target for the final, approved marketing plan, which is in sync with the go-live date for the plone.com website.

plone.org

Ramon Bosch

We defined a plan for the evolution of plone.org:

  • Sneridagh is working on a Plone theme with Diazo that applies the new design for plone.org.
  • We have a complete backup of plone.org, so we can begin a migration plan and apply the design.
  • We are going place Plone Software Center on a separate Plone instance, so it can be dealt with on its own in the future.
  • We will migrate to the new instance the content that is going to be on plone.org: Foundation, About Plone, Events, etc.
  • ploneweb.topbar will be the top navigation bar for the Plone ecosystem, with links to developers/plone.com and national sites.
  • We are working on plone.org community features: Main-page indicators, main-page photos of community people and developer profiles, with information about commits, breaks on Jenkins, related teams, etc.

Our idea is to write a scheduling plan and push it to plone-developers in order to find people who want to help (right now we are ¾ of a full team).

The final point would be a sprint (we are looking for somebody who wants to organize this), in which we will stop plone.org, move and organize content, and put it online again.

Security

Matthew Wilkes

We have a small active team, and find it very difficult to recruit new members. We have been considering ways of improving this, such as providing new members with discrete tasks at first, so they don't have to learn the entire process at once.

We have worked very hard on improving the quality of the hotfixes we release and are happy with that, but we need help improving our internal processes as everything is very manual at the moment. For example, this includes improving plone.org and making it easier to provide downstream communities with information.

We are planning to host a sprint in the coming few months in Amsterdam that will focus on this. It will be semi-open, so if anyone established in the community wants to help out or to join the team they will be welcome.

Testing

Timo Stollenwerk

We had a testing team sprint in Barcelona, Spain, in February. This was  organized by Iskra. Among other things, we worked on the following:

After the sprint, we continued to work on these issues, especially making Robot Framework tests run more reliably. In addition, we plan to work on better testing documentation, testing GitHub pull-requests with Jenkins, better static code analysis (PEP8, JSHINT, etc) and setting up new Jenkins instances for the release and the security team.

We set up a mailing list recently, and we plan to schedule monthly meetings of the testing team from now on.

UI

Nathan Van Gheem

We are working on the following:

  • We've been getting a lot of work done on widgets: New related items, query string, live search, and other widgets
  • Most of Plone core JavaScript converted and tested
  • New Plone 5.0 theme--Thjis is heading this up
  • Plans for usability testing of widgets
  • Another sprint in Indiana in less than a month