Plone.org Is Getting a Facelift
The marketing team has been fixing bugs, curating content and improving visual aspects of the site - we'd love your help!
Years have passed since the 2016 sprint at Penn State where a team of community members worked on a new theme and madly reorganized content on the Plone 5 version of plone.org. The site dates back to 2002 and the Plone 1 days, and the software and content had been upgraded in place over the years with only minor theme changes - to Plone 2 and 2.5, then Plone 3, then Plone 4, and finally Plone 4.3. It served us well, but because Plone 5 brought many changes, including a new out-of-the-box theme (Barceloneta), we mounted a major effort to refresh the design as well as upgrade the content and software.
What was new then is now looking old, and the marketing team has embarked on a modernization effort. The ultimate goal is to upgrade to Plone 6 and create a React-based theme using the new front end. But meanwhile we've been having a series of mini-sprints to improve what we have now.
Our first major initiative was to improve the News section, which holds an amazing collection of content. Browsing it can take you back in time - to the Plone 1.0 RC1 release announcement for example, or Alan's 2002 thoughts on what Plone should be, or approval of the Plone Foundation as a 501(c)(3) organization. It was already possible to browse news items by year, but we thought categorization by topic would also be useful. So we tagged every news item, and now you can browse news items by category. Fulvio Casali chronicled this effort in his 2020 Plone Conference talk Oh the Places We've Been!
A not very attractive display of news items and listings was another issue. So we sketched out a cleaner look, with a standardized lead image aspect ratio and a more useful byline. Then the more technically adventurous members of the marketing team (Norbert, Fulvio, Érico) strapped on helmets and figured out how to make changes to the site's theme. You are looking at our initial improvements, and there's more to come.
Our other major initiative is to move the contents of the plone.com site over to plone.org. Over the years plone.com became very difficult to maintain, so we have discontinued it. (Contact the marketing team if you need to retrieve any plone.com content.) With that in mind, we created a What is Plone? section on plone.org which is oriented towards the plone.com audience. It is also a place for us to describe all the pieces of the Plone ecosystem and how they fit together.
In addition to these bigger jobs we've been making lots of little improvements during our mini-sprints, including fixing bugs old and new as recorded on the plone.org issue tracker.
Would you like to help with this effort?
We'd love to have you!
- Join our effort to promote Plone by publishing regular plone.org news items - successes, new developments, controversies, generally telling a broad audience what's happening in the Plone world
- Do you have design skills? We don't and we need help with design improvements and eventually a new theme for Plone 6
- If you are a theming wizard please help us modernize the site styles - more 2021 and less 2016
- Show off Plone's built in search by creating a beautiful search results listing
- Help us with our ongoing efforts to fix bugs and curate content
- Help us migrate plone.org to Plone 6
Please contact the marketing team to get involved. Anyone with technical, design or content editor skills is welcome.