Salamina Sprint 2025 - report

When collaboration and espresso are a winning combination

From September 8th to 12th, Ferrara once again welcomed Plonista for the Salamina Sprint 2025, hosted by RedTurtle.

Building on the success of last year’s inaugural sprint, over two dozen developers gathered in person (with several joining remotely) to push forward on some of Plone’s most ambitious goals:

Plone 7 frontend (Seven)
Volto 19
Accessibility (a11y)
and ongoing improvements across the Plone ecosystem

Focus and Highlights

The sprint centered around Plone 7’s new editor and UI, a major milestone that brings together years of community experience in frontend innovation.

Key areas of focus included:

Plone 7 Editor and Blocks

Victor, Piero, and Wagner refined the structure of the block editing experience, ensuring it’s accessible and intuitive from the start.
The Slate/Plate editor integration in Seven took shape, bringing modern text editing capabilities and keyboard-friendly navigation between blocks and sidebars.
A proof of concept for the Plate editor was completed by the end of the week, marking a major step forward.

Widgets and Views

Sabrina finalized the Recurrence Widget PR, while Martina advanced the Object Browser Widget;
Sara implemented the first version of the Search page, now merged.
Nilesh and Ionut worked on Select and Multiselect Widgets, and Nilesh also delivered the new Language Selector for Seven.
The Image Component was merged thanks to Alin’s work.

Accessibility (a11y)

Accessibility remained a defining theme throughout the sprint.

Wagner conducted deep a11y analyses on the Search and Sharing pages, focusing on landmarks, headings, and keyboard navigation.
Jakob enhanced accessibility tests in VLT and kitconcept.intranet, removing outdated rules and improving coverage.
Discussions led by Paul, Gil, and Jakob addressed issues around duplicate IDs and heading structures within the new editor.

Python Backend & Infrastructure

Backend work continued in full swing:

Gil and Maurits progressed on the transition to PEP 420 namespace packages, converting dozens of repositories to a consistent src/ layout.
The Buildout modernization effort continued, aiming for smoother pip installations.
Jenkins received upgrades and new node configurations to improve CI performance.

Foundation & Admin Team

Steve handled administrative and financial updates for the Plone Foundation.
Fred, Paul, and Érico worked on documenting and cleaning up access across the Foundation’s Google Workspace and GitHub organizations.

Add-ons, Tools, and More

The week also saw impressive progress across several community-maintained packages:

collective.contact_behaviors reached version 1.0.0b4
collective.person updated to 1.0.0b2
collective.html2blocks was released (1.0.0a1), introducing automated HTML-to-block conversion
collective.transmute and volto-authomatic received refinements, including GDPR-related improvements
A new VSCode extension, plone-vs-utilities, was released — combining snippets, ZCML support, and tooling for developers
Work also continued on UniversalLink, volto-code-block, and cookieplone-templates enhancements.

Impact and Next Steps

By the end of the sprint, several major Plone 7 components, including the Plate editor, Search view, Language selector, and key widgets, were merged or ready for review.

Accessibility saw measurable improvements across the board, backend modernization advanced significantly, and community tools received meaningful updates.

The Salamina Sprint was the last sprint before the Plone Conference. And we can say that much has been accomplished! It was a long week, but full of satisfaction!

Hard work needs hard fun!

Ferrara’s charm set the perfect scene for long coding days and lively evenings. Each night, the group gathered at a different local restaurant sampling traditional dishes and enjoying some events throughout the night.