December 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. Here's what happened in December.
Issue #11
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Upcoming Events
Documentation Strategic Meeting, Jan 16, Amsterdam
Alpine City Sprint; Jan 21–25; Innsbruck, Austria
Anne conference held of screen reader NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access); Feb 7; Tokyo, Japan New!
Plone Open Garden (PLOG) 2015; Apr 7–11; Sorrento, Italy New!
PyCon US 2015; Apr 10–12; Montréal, QC
Anniversary Sprint 2015; Jun 22–26; Arnhem, The Netherlands
Plone Conference 2015; Oct 12–18; Bucharest, Romania New!
Announcements
Lecture of Plone in Yamagata Prefecture
Yamagata Prefecture, organized by the Industrial Technology Center will be the talk of the latest trends in Plone. In Yamagata Prefecture, including the prefectural government site from 2006, some of the site has been operating in Plone. I am going to talk about "CMS (content management system) guidance of the latest developments seminar" say two and a half hours in the title slowly and carefully Plone. People near you I I think you'll come.
Announcing the PLOG Strategic Summit
Setting a roadmap for the future of Plone. The Board of the Plone Foundation has decided to designate the 2015 edition of Plone Open Garden (PLOG) as a strategic summit. Of course this has been done after consulting Abstract (the organizers of PLOG) and other community members.
Plone Conference Bucharest October 2015
Plone Conference 2015 will take place October 14-16, 2015, in Bucharest, Romania. The schedule will include pre-conference trainings and post-conference sprints.
Get Help and Join the Community
- Documentation
- Live Support IRC Chat
- Recommended Add-ons
- Community Discussions
- GitHub
- Google Plus
How To
Using a Webfont to Display Icons
When creating our new Four Digits website we needed to display a lot of icons. Since our website needed to be responsive, have sharp images on retina displays and short loading times, using standard images didn't work well. We tried a different technique which is using a webfont to display the icons. This blogpost explains how you can use vector images in your own website using grunt.
How I Created My Blog with Heroku and Plone
In my first post, I explain how I made my blog, with Plone, Heroku and buildout.
An Introduction to BeautifulSoup
Few things are less fun than parsing text, even when that text is supposed to be formatted according to certain rules (like HTML). We all know the web is full of badly written markup, so the effort required to reliably extract data from it is daunting. Save yourself a few months of work, and just use BeautifulSoup.
How I Follow Plone 5 Development
The Plone developers have been working hard over the last years to build the next major release of Plone. It's now around the corner, and it's going to shine in CMS land. The first thing I am doing is testing its features for the end user, and since I am impatient, I use the core developers buildout and try to keep up with the development builds.
Turning a Static Theme into a Diazo Theme Through the Web
Overview: 1. Find/Create a static theme, 2. Create a new Diazo theme in the Theming control panel, 3. Copy in files from theme, 4. Write/Build the rules.xml.
This is a work around for TinyMCE stripping out embed code. It uses the "Snippets" product created by Sam Schwartz.
Control setuptools Version Installed by buildout bootstrap
Use --setuptools-version as parameter when running bootstrap.py
Workaround Setuptools 8.0 Bug with zc.buildout
Buildout always fetches the latest version of setuptools for bootstraping. No matter what is defined in versions.cfg. It is possible to set the version of zc.buildout when bootstraping but not the one of setuptools.
The Zope Management Interface (ZMI) is the web interface for interacting with the Zope framework, which Plone runs on. As a new Plone developer, here are some of the things I've found useful within the ZMI.
Debugging Python Code with pdb
The Python Debugger (pdb) is a powerful tool that all Python developers should be familiar with. It is an interactive debugger that you can start up anywhere in your codebase. This makes debugging complex or confusing code much simpler, since you can interact directly with the code in a running state.
How to Prevent Link Spam in the Built-In Contact-Info Form
The default contact-info form that ships with Plone sometimes gets abused by spammers who include URLs in the subject and comments fields.
Learning Resources
For those who haven't heard, PACKT is having a $5 "bonanza". Pick up some $5 Python books while you can!
Sprint Reports & Conference Summaries
CodeJam: Cutting Edge Web Application Development
On 2 and 3 December, I had the good fortune and pleasure to participate in CodeJam, a workshop dedicated to the latest technologies and promising in circulation.
Add-ons and Customizations
#varnish 4 buildout recipe overhaul/ template based vcl ready for testers...
I have been working with Docker over the fews in order build a demo system for XML Director. Docker in general looks nice and promising but there are lot of things that cause some headaches...
Coming soon in Plone 5, the Plone Toolbar is perhaps the first real serious reworking of the Plone editing UI in a decade.
zest.releaser and Some Add-ons
For some time we have been using a release_egg.sh script found in some plone svn repository (currently unreachable) to do proper egg releases, bump the egg version and upload them to pypi or our custom repository. But now we are moving to use zest.releaser for both public and private eggs. We have written two add-ons for it to ease our move from our previous hand-made-scripts.
Travis-CI allows caches for public repos! Speed up your #Plone builds with...
Assorted Articles
Introducing the Diazo Snippets Library (and less Arcane)
Roughly a year ago today, I wrote a blog post entitled "Diazo theming is great, now we need a snippets library". It is therefore somewhat appropriate that I am able to reveal my first simple attempts at addressing the snippets library problem in a blog post almost exactly 1 year later.
Now and Future of Community Activities
In year-end, but I was thinking even want to do this year summary, and I will write about the future and now (this year) for community activities.
Not only is it ChrisKwanFestNukkStice, it's just a week away from New Year's Eve. That can mean only one thing: Plone Metrics Person of the Year and chasing away the wolf that ate the sun (thx to @LeVostrCG). I'm now accepting suggestions for a metric that can be used to differentiate one member of the Plone community from all the rest of this amazing group of people who keep the wheels of Plone spinning.
SEO–These are the Trends for 2015!
What changes 2015 and what is more important for search engine optimization in the next year? The end of the year is to look for us at the time, which could change in the new year in the main areas of online marketing. The first we have already started with a social media outlook. Today we want to take care of the field of search engine optimization.
The affiliate marketing is a kind of collaboration between two partners. On the one hand there is the seller (also called Merchant) and on the other hand, the website operator (affiliate called).
Modern CMSs are built for power users - interview of Tony Byrne
Social Media: A Little Forecasts up to 2015
What will the new year in social media with it? The year is coming slowly to an end. One reason for us to look once the changes and new features will be next year in the areas of social media, SEO and E-commerce and what to look for. We start today with the social media marketing.
Plone Community Wisdom: A Personal Take on the Bristol Plone 2020 Open Space
...wherein the author provides a personal reflection on an anxiety-causing possible crisis point for the Plone project, which was resolved brilliantly during the Plone 2020 open space.
eGenix mxODBC Zope DA 2.2.0 GA
The eGenix mxODBC Zope DA™ allows you to easily connect your Plone CMS or Zope installation to just about any database backend on the market today, giving you the reliability of the commercially supported eGenix product mxODBC and the flexibility of the ODBC standard as middle-tier architecture.
Integrate an Alternative PDF Viewer in Lotus Domino
All browsers has its own PDF plug-in for PDF files, Acrobat Reader is for IE. But...have you ever had problems with it? I will! That's why I looked for another solution.
Announcing the "XML-Director" XML CMS Project
XML-Director will be a new-generation XML content management system based on the Plone 5 CMS with either eXist-db or Base-X as backend. Additional components will provide DOCX to XML and XML/HTML to PDF/EPub conversion, support for desktop and web-based XML editors.
Python
Naming Things: Don't Use Reserved Words
I’m currently cleaning up some code. Some people just cannot spell “p-e-p-8” if their lives depended on it, apparently. Luckily I’m civilized so I only threaten with dismemberment. Look at this gem I just uncovered...
A Review of the Web and How Morepath Fits In
I've spent a bit of time writing the somewhat grandiosely titled A Review of the Web, and I think it's a neat addition to the documentation of the Morepath web framework.