First Axolote Sprint a Success
Our first sprint in Mexico City celebrated World Plone Day, made progress on a variety of topics and engaged local computer science students

First Axolote Sprint a Success

The Axolote Sprint took place from April 15th through 19th in Mexico City at the Mathematics Institute of UNAM, Mexico's top research and teaching university. Eight Plonistas from Europe and North and South America gathered to advance Plone's functionality and documentation, and to participate in World Plone Day by giving a variety of talks. The sprint was expertly organized by three Mexico City natives - Dante Álvarez, who works at kitconcept, and Adriana Ramírez and Gil Bautista, both of whom work at the Mathematics Institute. Adriana and Gil were an invalulable link to the Institute, which generously sponsored the sprint and provided the venue. The facilities were ideal. We had a comfortable space for work and discussions, an auditorium for our World Plone Day presentations, a rooftop area for a barbacoa feast, transportation to restaurants for some of our lunches, and access to lovely gardens and good COFFEE.

Participants in the Axolote Sprint

Left to right: Adriana Ramírez, Sally Kleinfeldt, Dante Álvarez, Érico Andrei, Steve Piercy, Victor Fernández de Alba, David Glick, Gil Bautista

Engaging With Students

Sprinting at the university gave us an opportunity to interact with local computer science students. They had no previous knowledge of Plone, but Adriana (who teaches computer science classes) invited them to join us. Quite a few attended our Monday (pre-recorded) and Wednesday (live streamed) World Plone Day talks, and we all found their participation energizing. Some of them tried Plone's demo site, comparing it to other technologies (Wordpress, Joomla), and showed an interest in learning more. They asked about participating in the community, and Adriana offered to organize an event at the end of the semester when they have more free time. One of the students, Mauricio López Miranda, joined us for the rest of the sprint and is considering using Plone for his thesis project!

World Plone Day

All sprinters contributed talks to World Plone Day, an annual event featuring Plone stories from around the world. Follow the links below to watch our talks on YouTube:

Sprint Topics

We also did some sprinting! We covered a wide variety of topics and as always, being able to come together in person was inspiring. Below are some of the highlights. For more details, see the Daily Standup Log in the sprint Google doc.

The sprint was big for Volto. It provided an opportunity for long-time members of the Plone community - especially Gil and Adriana - to learn about Volto and start using it productively, thus becoming Volto supporters, contributors and even trainers. The sprint also provided a great opportunity for Victor and Dante to make improvements and take the first steps towards creating a new Volto editing experience.

David and Érico made significant progress on updating plone.distribution to use plone.exportimport instead of collective.exportimport. This paves the way to including plone.distribution in Plone core for the Plone 6.1 release, which will make it possible to start Plone projects with a wider variety of preset configurations and sample content.

The highlight for Steve was making significant progress on the Plone Sphinx Theme for documentation. He released it to PyPI soon after the sprint, and will start applying it to our projects. He also improved the skeleton for the Deployment docs, and will continue to populate them with accurate and current guidance.

Sally focused on plone.org improvements, including the news and events section (tag cleanup, creating news items for all podcast episodes), information architecture, ticket gardening, and discussions of how to fix persistent problems.

Many people made improvements to many things, including Volto Light Theme, Cookiecutter, Docker images, Volto core and Plone's headless features.

We also had numerous fruitful discussions and planning sessions. Topics included:

  • Fleshing out Steve Piercy’s PLIP for Enhanced timezone support in UI for plone.app.event based types
  • Considering the best ways to replace FacultyStaffDirectory using collective.person and other Dexterity-based add-ons
  • Brainstorming about Plone's headless CMS story - what features to develop and how to market it
  • Strategizing fixes to plone.org
  • Supporting multilingualism in the Plone community

All Work and No Play? No Way!

Many of the sprinters arrived in Mexico City the weekend before the sprint, and our wonderful organizers planned excursions for us. On Saturday a group visited the Teotihuacan archeological site, and on Sunday we took a boat ride on the canals of Xoximilco.

Next Year

Something we've all enjoyed in the Plone community over the years is how members of the community take turns hosting events in their home countries. This sprint laid the foundations for a yearly North American Plone event - very much needed these days. So mark your calendars and start making travel plans for the next Axolote Sprint, which will be held in June 2025. Three cheers for Dante, Adriana and Gil for being up for it a second time.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the sponsors who made the sprint possible. In addition to the Mathematics Institute which provided the wonderful venue, kitconcept, Jazkarta, the Plone Foundation and the Plone Marketing Team all contributed financially. Our group meals and sprint gear (bags, tee shirts and mugs) made the event truly special and gave us the opportunity to share with college students - hopefully future Plonistas! - what we do and love.