Introducing Plone Blicca

_{Published date: June 2, 2026}

For years, the server-rendered frontend of Plone has gone by a working title: Classic UI. As of today, it has a real name — Blicca.

This is more than a label change. It reflects a decision the team has made about the future of the project: the classic, server-rendered frontend is here to stay, and it deserves a name that says so.

Why rename it now?

"Classic UI" was always kind of an internal project name for the successor of the Barceloneta theme — the established, server-rendered interface, set apart from the new React-based frontend, Volto. The theme name stuck around through Plone 6, and it will carry into Plone 7 — but with significant renewal and investment along the way.

This frontend is very much a living part of Plone: actively developed, first-class, and with a long road ahead. A name like "Classic UI" undersells that — it can sound like the old way of doing things, when in fact it is one of two modern, supported paths forward.

So we gave it a proper name — one that can grow with the project rather than dating it.

Why "Blicca"?

The name comes from the water, by tradition. Plone's underlying application server, Zope, shares its name with a freshwater fish — the zope (Ballerus ballerus), a member of the carp and minnow family. When it came time to name the frontend, we wanted to stay in that family.

Blicca is Blicca bjoerkna, the silver bream — a real fish, and a genuine member of Leuciscidae, the very family Zope's namesake belongs to. It earned its place by quietly doing everything we hoped a name might do:

• View — in German, Blick means a look, a glance, a view: exactly what a user-facing frontend is.
• Shiny — the silver bream is iridescent, a nice nod to a polished interface and to theming.
• Family — it belongs to Zope's own fish family, keeping the lineage intact.
• Clean — the name was free across PyPI, npm, GitHub, and trademark registers, so there were no collisions to inherit.

What's changing

The rename is already rolling out across the project. The team formerly known as the Classic UI Team is now the Blicca Team, and the community channels — including Discord (blicca channel) and GitHub (@plone/blicca-team) — have moved to the new name. Documentation and references will be updated continuously to use Blicca as part of the future development.

The frontend you know continues exactly as before, with the same goals and the same momentum toward Plone 7 — and there is plenty ahead. A major focus is theme separation, pulling the theme layer and rendering templates fully apart from the backend so that Plone can serve as a completely headless backend — and it will include the new theme. Alongside that, frontend editing is getting real attention, including a rewritten folder contents management and continuous effort to reuse editing UI components across the frontend stacks.

Cheers, the Blicca Team 🐟