October Newsletter
Welcome to the Plone Newsletter where on or about the beginning of each month we send you the previous month’s news and upcoming events from around the world.
Issue #8
October was a busy month so grab your drink of choice and get comfortable, you have a lot of reading to do! And keep an eye on your inbox, a special edition that you won't want to miss is coming your way in just a couple of days!
Brought to you by,
the Plone Communications Team
Events
Plone Dutch Users Day, Nov 18; Arnhem
Alpine City Sprint; Jan 21–25, 2015; Innsbruck, Austria
Anniversary Sprint 2015; Jun 22–26; Arnhem, The Netherlands
Announcements
Annual Report of the Plone Foundation, 2014
This report summarizes the finances and activities of the Plone Foundation, a US corporation operating as a tax exempt 501c3 educational institution. It contains both formal information, like officer listings and budget summaries, and some reflections of the experience of the 2013/2014 Board of Directors, in hopes it will be useful to future boards and members of the Plone Foundation.
Nominations Open for Plone Foundation Board of Directors
If you have an interest in helping the governance of Plone, and particularly the energy and time to pitch in, please consider nominating yourself to serve on the Plone Foundation board of directors for 2014-2015.
Plone Foundation Welcomes New Members
Johannes Raggam, Leonardo J. Caballero G. and Maarten Kling are the Foundation's newest members.
Get Help and Join the Community
Plone 5
Porting Tests to plone.app.testing for Plone 5
A major version of a piece of software always means to leave behind some burdon. Plone ships with two testing framworks since Plone 4. Now it is time to get rid of one of them: PloneTestCase. With the newer plone.app.testing framework it is possible to specify layers to encapsulate testing scenarios and dependencies. I don't want to compete the excelent plone.app.testing documentation here but provide some tipps for porting your addons from PloneTestCase to plone.app.testing.
How To
How to use Diazo for Plone Theming
Diazo is a theming approach for various content management systems.
Too Many Ways to do Async Tasks with Plone
Triggering asynchronous tasks from Plone is hard, we hear. And that's actually quite surprising, given that, from its very beginning, Plone has been running on top of the first asynchronous web server written in Python, medusa.
Sqlite Array Type and Python SQLAlchemy
I need to write up things just for remembering how I solved a particular issue if occurs in the future.
Tracking Down Pesky Buildout Version Pins or Requirements
Here are some ways to figure out the cause of conflicting version errors like this when you run buildout...
How to Change Versions of Plone in Your Vagrant Install
How to Hide the Title and/or Description on a Plone 4 Page
If you want to hide the title and description on a Plone page, you can create a new template that does that.
PloneFormGen syntax-type stuff
How to Export and Import Plone User
Using bin/instance debug
Migrating a Site with medialog.lxml
A quick walk-through of how to migrate a simple, static site to Plone with medialog.lxml (the quick and dirty way).
How to Find Referring Links to File and Image Objects
If you want to find what other items on a Plone site refer to (include a link to) a particular File or Image object, create an External Method called "reflist".
Learning Resources
Python Django Training Course Now Available
It’s official. We’ve taken the challenge of finding well-trained Python developers into our own hands. Clayton and I will be teaching a 5-day immersive training on Python and Django December 1st - December 5th, 2014 at Eleven Fifty in Carmel, Indiana.
Zeal: Documentation Always Available for Your Work
What if in the middle of a problem, with the need to find the documentation to solve it, there is no network and can not turn to St. Google?
Sprint Reports & Conference Summaries
ShipIt Day 13 Rocked the Sixie House, Literally
Wow, we got a lot of awesomeness done during this ShipIt Day! And we got to hang out in the comfort of Calvin & Gabrielle's home while we plugged away. It was tons of fun and some of us worked tirelessly until 6 am.
A Spontaneous Weekend Plone Sprint
I unintentionally did a Plone sprint this weekend with Alex Clark on the fantastic Plone installer called Plock.
Add-ons and Customizations
Lineage 2.0 for Multisite is Plone 5 & Dexterity Compatible
We've seen a lot of activity around Lineage this year and wanted to make sure that before PloneConf we had a fresh new version of Lineage for Plone 4.x and Plone 5.
7 interesting products that you might want to use Plone
There are some Plone products that will never become known to the public because they do not offer visible to the user. We give them justice!
1.9.0 Release Brings New Features and Documentation to collective.recipe.plonesite
The 1.9.0 release of collective.recipe.plonesite is now available on PyPi. This release brings several new features and some improvements to the documentation.
A Different Approach to Mobile Theming
Mobile theming with zettwerk.mobiletheming and medialog.simpleslier
Forms in Plone - PloneFormGen vs. Formstack
When displaying forms in a Plone site, you can choose a hosted service like Formstack, or go with a Plone add-on like PloneFormGen. I'll take a look at how each of these options work from the perspective of a marketer or content creator.
Plumi Installation Scripts for CentOS
The KARL project has been focused in the last year on some performance and scalability issues. It’s a reasonably big database, ZODB-atop-RelStorage-atop-PostgreSQL. It’s also heavily security-centric with decent writes, so CDNs and other page caching wasn’t going to help.
Assorted Articles
The Peak of Plone T-shirt Collection
Quick Guide to Generating SSL Certificates
If you take donations, chances are you have SSL certificates installed on your site.
I’m going flipping insane. In ye olde days, when I was programming with the python CMS Plone, my dependencies were limited to python and PIL. Perhaps lxml. LXML was a pain to install sometimes, but there were ways around it.
New PAQs Start With How to Submit Your Emergency
Stay Ahead of the PAQ with Plone
I'm Going to Plone Conference 2014
Plone Conference will be held at the end of October in the UK of Bristol. Is becoming a tradition every year, it is the participation of the Company, but I'm going with 3 people, including me this year.
Just a week ago I attended BetterSoftware 2014; here are my impressions of the (many) lights and the (few) shadows of the event in Florence.
Using SaltStack for Server Configuration Management and More
Salt is currently one of the fastest growing configuration management systems. It is written in Python and uses ZeroMQ to communicate nearly instantaneously with all of the servers in your infrastructure that it calls minions.
Are you a Plone or Python developer? Join us
Opportunities are available for full-time employment in Germany as well as for remote freelance contracts.
Humans vs. Robots: Testing for Quality
Six Feet Up is frequently asked about including human-powered Quality Assurance (QA) as a part of our testing process. Some people believe that QA can be done completely with unit tests, but a better product can be delivered when humans are dedicated to QA.
Announcing the Anniversary Sprint 2015
Four Digits will be 10 years old on the 23rd of June 2015, so what better way to celebrate then a Plone Sprint!
Vaadin: Installation, Use and Integration with Lotus Domino
Vaadin is an open source Web application framework for rich Internet applications. I'll show you a brief example of integration with Lotus Domino in Eclipse environment
Interaktiv Sponsors Plone Conference 2014
In the seven days of Plone Conference in Bristol is all about the content management system Plone. In many lectures developers, users, designers, and newcomers get a lot of valuable information and tips about Plone.
I recently started learning to develop for the Python-based CMS, Plone. This is my perspective on learning to be a Plone developer with years of experience as a SysAdmin and Python developer.
The Original Sin of Nonprofit Capacity Builders
Back in 2011, a few weeks before I left Groundwire (R.I.P.), I was at a nonprofit conference down in southern Oregon... I swear that the clouds parted and a great beam of light shone down on us. (Never mind that we were indoors.) I heard the clap of thunder, but maybe it was just the sound of my jaw hitting the concrete floor.
They Say Something I Don't Like So They Must Be Lying!
People frequently conclude inaccurately that someone who criticizes their community in some way is not only wrong, but also actively malicious; a liar, a manipulator, a troll. This faulty conclusion can lead to a lot of trouble.
Sandy's First Day with Plone and the Plone Newbie Developer Kit
"Plone add-ons?" Sandy had never heard of Plone before, now she had a weekend to become familiar with it.
Is a Web Consolidation Strategy Right For You?
Fortunately, most enterprise CMSs already offer some level of multi-site management features thus there is no need to reinvent the wheel. So, is a web consolidation in order for your organization? Here are 7 key factors to review before making a decision...
Python
Faster Relevance Ranking Didn’t Make It Into PostgreSQL 9.4
Alas, the one big feature we really needed, the patch apparently got rejected.
Safe Evaluation of Math Expressions in Pure Python
This blog post discusses how to evaluate user inputted math expressions safely in Python without using any third party libraries.
As of Pillow 2.6.0, the Pillow project almost completely runs itself! Of course when I say "runs itself" I mean "runs without me", which is what every open source project lead hopes for. For the first time ever, I was able to...