Axolote Sprint 2025 - Report
Our second Mexico City sprint focused on significant technical advancement across Plone's core systems while introducing the platform to university faculty, researchers, and technical staff at UNAM's prestigious Mathematics Institute.

Axolote Sprint 2025 - Report

Our second Mexico City sprint focused on significant technical advancement across Plone's core systems while introducing the platform to university faculty, researchers, and technical staff at UNAM's prestigious Mathematics Institute.

The second Axolote Sprint took place from June 23rd through 27th in Mexico City at the Mathematics Institute of UNAM, Mexico's top research and teaching university. Building on the success of our inaugural event last year, eight Plonistas from Europe and North America returned to Mexico City to continue advancing Plone's technical capabilities. Once again, the sprint was organized by our Mexico City hosts: Adriana Ramírez Vigueras and Gil Bautista from the Instituto de Matemáticas, and Dante Álvarez from kitconcept, GmbH. The Mathematics Institute once again generously sponsored the event and provided exceptional facilities. We enjoyed the same comfortable workspace for intensive development sessions, plenty of space for technical discussions, the rooftop area for our traditional terrace lunch, convenient transportation for group meals, access to the beautiful campus grounds and, of course, excellent coffee.

Introducing Plone to University Faculty and Staff

Being hosted at the university provided us with a unique opportunity to showcase Plone to faculty members, researchers, and technical staff. We discussed Plone's capabilities for academic content management, showing how it could address common challenges faced by educational institutions and large scale research organizations. The faculty were particularly interested in an educational distribution and Plone’s content management workflows. The presentation was followed by an Editors training and a warm Q&A session. It was a special chance to share with many the things we do and love.

Sprint Topics

We covered a wide variety of technical topics, and as always, being able to come together in person was inspiring. Below are the highlights of our development work:

  • Adriana and Gil continued their work on the new add-on product for the Educational distribution. They added features such as a datagrid for managing multiple professors and a validator for course dates. By the end of the week, they had successfully created a site using Volto and the Light Theme and were testing the documentation and installation flow.
  • Víctor focused on improving the Developer Experience (DX) and documentation for Seven. He merged the rearranged components PR #7185, developed new Field and FieldWrapper components #7213, and worked on polishing aspects of the @plone/components package. He worked in extending the current add-on CSS loader to support loading cmsui-only styles. Alongside Piero, he also advanced the proof-of-concept implementation for the new block editor and schema rendering in Seven, enabling selection and data-saving of blocks in the sidebar.
  • David worked intensively on multiple fronts:

    • Upgrading and cleaning up plone.org, including removing unused blocks #199, replacing deprecated DraftJS blocks with newer alternatives, and migrating content to slate-based blocks #201.

    • He experimented with generating relative URLs in plone.restapi to simplify frontend integration (diff, discussion).

    • Fixed Windows path handling in plone.exportimport #65.

    • Released a fix for horse-with-no-namespace and made it compatible with Buildout.

    • Improved virtualenv isolation for backend environments in Cookieplone #256.

    • Reviewed Volto subpath support #6897 and continued work on the davisagli-prefix-path branch.

  • Dante contributed bug fixes to VLT and worked toward merging the block model v3. He built a basic implementation of the new Agave theme for Seven in the seven-agave branch and helped prototype blocks rendering for the new frontend.
  • Piero was involved in the @plone/contents package, ensuring features like delete, manual drag-and-drop, and cut/copy/paste worked correctly. He also collaborated with Víctor on theming improvements, separating Tailwind and non-Tailwind styles, which now power the public UI CSS in Seven’s Agave branch. Together, they implemented a basic working version of the new block editing engine.
  • Brian (Fosten) and Sally worked remotely with David on analyzing and replacing deprecated DraftJS-based blocks in plone.org, suggesting suitable add-on replacements and identifying unused ones. Fosten also led actual content replacements: swapping image_columns with Listing Blocks, hero blocks with text7, and migrating others like text and Description blocks.
  • Edgar contributed a new view for the course content type, including image support.
  • Steve raised questions about the future use of Storybook 9 features and how they could integrate with the current theming and block rendering direction (discussion, issue).

Xochimilco magic!

Many of the sprinters arrived in Mexico City a little before the sprint, and our generous organizers planned the now traditional excursion for us. On Sunday the group took a boat ride on the magical canals of Xochimilco. Between that and the amazing gastronomic tour, we had our bellies full and our hearts happy throughout the entire sprint!

Looking Ahead

The success of this second Axolote Sprint has firmly established this as an essential annual event for the North American Plone community. The momentum we've built over these two years has created a strong foundation for continued technical advancement and community growth. The format has proven invaluable for tackling complex development challenges that benefit from in-person collaboration. So stay tuned for the details on the Axolote Sprint 2026! Once again, huge appreciation to our organizers for their enthusiasm in continuing to host this awesome community gathering.

Sprint Doc

Photos