Salamina Sprint: a made in Italy experience
The medieval city of Ferrara hosted our first sprint. No knight investiture this time, but had a great focus on accessibility, performance, and something more.
The Salamina Sprint 2024 took place from September 24th to 27th in Ferrara at RedTurtle’s headquarters.
With 30 participants, including three joining remotely, the event was a vibrant mix of collaboration and innovation.
This sprint focused on accessibility, performance, and key Plone improvements.
Thankfully, the weather was on our side, so we could enjoy the work, the friends and especially the food!
Sprint Achievements
Over the course of four days, we made substantial progress in accessibility, performance, and key features like Vite integration and JS bundle optimization.
Vite Implementation
One of the main achievements was advancing the migration from Razzle to Vite for Volto.
This will enhance performance, reduce build times, and align Volto with modern JavaScript standards. The team worked hard to eliminate barrel import files and shift to React lazy and suspense for component loading.
Accessibility (A11y)
Accessibility was a central focus of the sprint.
Major steps were made in improving the user experience for keyboard users, particularly in the blocks editor.
Solutions were designed for better keyboard navigation, and accessibility tests were added to ensure compliance. Furthermore, the Volto image gallery, user/group membership control panels, and sidebar elements saw accessibility improvements.
Key PRs were merged, addressing issues like select widget accessibility and screen reader announcements for page changes.
Folder Contents Revamp
Significant progress was made on the complete revamp of the folder contents feature.
The @plone/contents package, now detached from Volto, improves performance and provides more flexibility.
Backend calls with @plone/client were integrated to streamline this process.
Video Block & Listing Block
The video block received a rework to remove dependencies on Semantic UI, enhancing performance and usability. Meanwhile, the listing block was fixed to ensure it follows proper HTML markup standards, improving accessibility and stability.
JS Bundle Optimization & Performance
Reducing the size of the JS bundle was another major achievement of the sprint.
A new PR was polished and submitted, achieving a 60kb reduction in the gzipped bundle size, which contributes to faster load times and improved user experience.
Miscellaneous Tasks
Several other tasks were completed during the sprint, such as:
Typesense integration: Initial work on integrating Typesense with Plone, in comparison with Elasticsearch and Solr.
Wikipedia updates: Italian and English pages were updated with the latest Plone information.
Volto translations: New Italian translations were added for Volto.
Fun and Games
While the Salamina Sprint was primarily focused on enhancing accessibility and performance, we also made sure to have our share of fun!
We bonded over excellent food, participated in numerous meetings, and shared laughter and stories, creating an atmosphere filled with camaraderie.
Better rephrase... We had a ton of meetings!
Conclusion
The Salamina Sprint 2024 delivered impactful results across multiple areas, particularly accessibility, performance optimization, and the ongoing Vite integration.
The community’s return to Italy proved to be a fruitful collaboration, showcasing the strength of teamwork and shared goals.
The achievements made during these days will be pivotal for the future of Plone and Volto.
PS. Salamina Sprint Will Return in 2025!