Plone Conference 2026 Sprint report
Published date 20261013
As usual at Plone conferences, we held a sprint (developer meetup / hackathon) at the end of the conference week. And as usual, it wasn't just about getting a whole lot of programming done. It was also a chance to discuss what we'd learned at the conference, talk about new developments in the Plone ecosystem, unblock ongoing work and pull requests, get to know the people we work with online during the rest of the year, introduce newcomers to the open source community and its processes, and have fun!
The sprint took place at De Brandweerkantine, within walking distance of the lovely city center. De Brandweerkantine is not only a nice kitchen and bar with very good coffee, but also hosts a coworking space where we could work.
There were around 35 of us, and these were the topics we discussed or worked on:
Separating Blicca code from Plone core
PLIP 3953 is a long-running task: we want to separate the backend-rendered page templates from Plone core and move them into plone.app.layout. After all, Volto and the upcoming Aurora don't need any of them.
The team finished and merged the template moves in seven core packages and opened five more pull requests, which are still in progress.
BPMN patterns in Plone
Following the talk at the Plone Conference, we worked on documenting Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) usage patterns in Plone. A documentation site was set up, a new release of collective.webhook (a content-rule-based webhook trigger) was published, and a GitHub Codespace was set up. Find more information at the BPMN with Plone documentation site.
Catalog optimizations for object moves
The Products.CMFCore draft pull request 161 proposes performance optimizations for object moves. The PR was reviewed and discussed, and an alternative approach was proposed and implemented. Benchmarks were also created. They show significant performance improvements with this pull request, especially when a lot of searchable text content is involved.
next.plone.org
A new Plone site is coming! The team worked on the content structure, how to present Aurora and Blicca, and accessibility issues. They also planned the migration and discussed a case study content type.
Plone Foundation membership applications
We received four new membership applications! Welcome!
Plone Foundation membership allows members to vote for the Plone Foundation board.
Deploying a meeting management tool
The iMio iA.Delib tool was deployed to help manage online meetings for the Plone Foundation.
Plone Edu
The Plone Education effort brought together people working with Plone in education or interested in doing so. The group created communication channels, discussed case studies, identified universities using Plone, and collected arguments for choosing Plone over solutions from external consultants. All of this will help strengthen Plone's position in the education market.
Enhancing time zone support
At the Buschenschanksprint in 2026, participants worked on PLIP 4115, which aims to improve time zone support in Plone. This should allow users to change an event's time zone and even set different time zones for its start and end dates. Since then, the pull requests had stalled because a few questions needed to be discussed in person. Those discussions took place at the sprint. The pull requests haven't been merged yet, but more activity is expected soon.
Blicca file manager VHM issue
The Blicca file manager does not return results for the querystring filter in VHM (Virtual Host Monster) setups. The problem and an initial fix are described at plone.restapi issue 2023. After some discussion, an alternative fix was proposed at plone.app.querystring PR 204.
Multipart file uploads in Aurora
The Aurora pull request 180 now enables multipart file uploads and eliminates the overhead of Base64 encoding. Resumable uploads in Aurora via tus and the Uppy file upload widget were also discussed.
Plone on Kubernetes
Participants discussed ways to create images, manage deployment configurations, and use tools to monitor and trace deployments. They also shared their experiences with these approaches and tools.
Adding more CSS classes to the body tag in Volto
Volto is missing some of the CSS classes on the body tag that Blicca already has. This is a long-standing Volto issue with no fix yet. A PLIP for plone.restapi was created to expand user roles in the current context, bringing us a step closer to fixing this issue.
Rethinking Plone MCP
One group discussed improvements to plone-mcp, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration package for Plone. They came up with ideas on how to authenticate with Plone using OAuth, expose the Plone permissions system to plone-mcp, and add traceability.
Anything outrageous
We were asked to come up with extraordinary, practical, long wanted or just fun ideas for things we'd like to do with Plone.
Ideas included “make the Pope praise Plone on the balcony” and “have more photos of food,” but also “make a nice PowerPoint presentation like consultants selling SharePoint do” and “have more sprints.” It was a good exercise in expressing wishes, making plans, and just having fun!
New theming approaches for Blicca
There was some discussion about improving and simplifying theming with Blicca. A common wish is to stop depending on Diazo. It has its use cases, but makes theming much more complex overall. Some approaches using viewlet managers to add pagelets were discussed and demonstrated. This is an ongoing discussion and will come up again in the future!
Aurora blocks in Blicca
There is a project to integrate Aurora's React blocks with the PlateJS-based editor in Blicca, which is rendered using page templates. There is already an impressive working prototype. This has the potential to bring Blicca and Aurora development closer together, so that both teams can build on the same technologies! The Aurora editor for Blicca is not yet publicly available, but soon will be.
Documentation
The documentation team released a new Plone Sphinx theme, updated the documentation template, and reviewed documentation pull requests.
More topics
- Improvements to the Mastering Plone training
- plone.restapi PR review
- Plone Agave design demo
- Plone Aurora PR reviews
- STA fund application
- Finding a date for World Plone Day 2027
- Plone security team meeting and RestrictedPython discussion
- Plone treasurer work
Sprint participants
This year's Plone Conference Sprint participants were
- Johannes Raggam (Sa / Su until noon)
- Paul Grunewald (Sa / Su until noon)
- Peter Mathis (Sa / Su -> remote)
- Benoît Suttor (Sa)
- Rémi Dubois (Sa)
- Christophe Boulanger (Sa)
- Antoine Duchêne (Sa)
- Thomas Lambert (Sa)
- Jens Klein (Sa)
- Torben Baumgartner (Sa)
- Asko Soukka (Sa / Su remote)
- Rikupekka Oksanen (Sa / Su remote)
- Alessandro Ceglie (sauzher) (sa/su morning)
- Fabio Iaquinta (fabiSwDevBeg) (sa/su morning)
- Giovanni Cozzolongo (gianniftp) (sa/su morning)
- Stefano Marchetti (Sa)
- Piero Nicolli (Sa)
- Mauro Amico (Sa)
- Jan Mevissen (Sa / Su until noon)
- Philip Bauer (Sa/Su until noon)
- Paul Roeland (Sa)
- Martin Peeters (Sa)
- Karel Calitz (Sa until 2pm)
- Alex Zeeman (Sa until 2pm)
- Astrid Beyers (Sa until 2pm)
- Johan Beyers (Sa until 2pm)
- David Glick (Sa)
- Armin Stroß-Radschinski (Sa / Su until noon)
- Steve Piercy (Sa)
- Maurits van Rees (Sa / Su morning)
- Alexander Loechel (Sa)
- Brian Davis (Sa remote / Su remote)
- João Henrique Gouveia (Sa / Su)
Find more information see the sprint notes. For more photos than the below see the flickr album.
