This Month in Plone - March 2010

It's been busy month for the Plone community as events filled up the 2010 calendar, the Plone Foundation announces its newest members, and the final alpha release before Plone 4 moves to Beta testing.

In this month's issue ...

 

Plone 4.0 alpha 5 released


The final alpha release before Plone 4 moves into a beta release cycle was released on Feb 19, 2010. A large number of feature/bug tickets have been addressed since alpha 4, there's been a major cleanup on the markup consistency front, and alpha 5 continues the significant performance improvements of the earlier 4.0 alpha releases.

If you want to help test this pre-release software and report any bugs (note: don't install this on important servers!), you can either:

- Download the Unified Installer from http://plone.org/products/plone/releases/4.0
- If you already have an earlier release of Plone 4 installed, just update your buildout.cfg to extend http://dist.plone.org/release/4.0a5/versions.cfg — and re-run buildout.

For those of you that need Windows and Mac installers, you'll get them with the first beta release, scheduled for release in March.


Plone Symposium East 2010 at Penn State Opens Registration


This regional Plone symposium hosted by Weblion at Penn State in State College, PA (USA) is coming back for its third year - offering a  full week of training, talks and sprints May 24-30.

Registration for the event is now open from the Symposium website, which is currently offering an early-bird discount rate for those who sign up before April 19th.

You can find out more about the event by visiting their symposium website. 

The Symposium organizers are accepting training and talks proposals via the same page - so if you're got ideas, now is the time to let yourself be heard.


Cathedral Sprint in Cologne, Germany to Address Tasks for Plone 4 Releases


This sprint will focus on tasks for the upcoming 4.1 and 4.2 releases. Potential topics include calendaring, collections UI, commenting, editing UI, and search results enhancements.

The Sprint is being sponsored by GFU Cyrus AG.  GFU is nowadays among the most renowned IT-coaching institutions in Germany. Several thousand IT specialists from all over the Federal Republic of Germany visit seminars at GFU every year. The program includes more than 550 different seminars from areas such as A for Administration through operating systems to Z for ZOPE.

Cologne has a 2,000-year history. Its people are well-known for their hospitality and zest for life. Cologne is the business hub in the west of Germany and the heart of Europe. It has a strong industrial tradition, being to the south-west of the highly industrialized and populated area of the “Ruhrgebiet”. Today it has a strong footing in the tertiary sector, with the media (TV), IT, and design industry being major employers.

For more information, contact Eric Steele at EricSteele@psu.edu or visit the sprint wiki.

Abstract will host a Plone Symposium 2010 in Sorrento, Italy.


The Abstract Team is happy to announce their second European Plone Symposium organized in Sorrento, Italy on May 26-30, 2010.

The event will feature two intensive days of talks and presentations on the state of Plone and its real-world applications, followed by three days of sprints on Plone matters.

Stay tuned for more details on how to propose a talk and how to register to the event.  The information will be posted on plone.org at http://plone.org/events/regional/european-symposium-2010


Plone Foundation Announces Newest Members - Mike Halm and Jens Vagelpohl


The Plone Foundation is pleased to announce that Mike Halm and Jens Vagelpohl have been awarded membership in the Plone Foundation. Membership is awarded for significant and sustained contributions to the Plone project, following a review by the Foundation’s membership committee and board of directors.

Mike Halm is the Director and Senior Strategist for the WebLion group, an in-house web development group for Penn State University. The WebLion group, under Mike's direction, has contributed significantly over the past five years open source in general, and Plone in particular.  This includes hosting of the Plone Symposium East - an annual event which draws attendees from around the globe. Mike has also been a major advocate for the use in Plone in education and research.

Jens Vagelpohl is a programmer and principal in Zetwork GmbH, a German web development company.  Jens is a core developer and release manager for the Zope Content Management Framework, and has been very responsive to the Plone community’s needs for framework updates and releases. He’s also helped with the development of the Pluggable Authentication System and pioneered the asynchronous mail drop host.


Plone shows up in Force at Pycon


The connections between the Plone and Python communities are strong and go back years, so its commonplace for Plone community members to show up in force for their annual Pycon conference.  Pycon 2010 in Atlanta, GA (USA) was no exception.

A cross section of the entire Plone community showed up  sporting their red World Plone Day t-shirts.  These members promoted the upcoming World Plone Day event in April 2010 in this cooperative effort arranged by Six Feet Up and Roberto Allende (the champion behind this global event) with support from the Plone Foundation.


News Plone logo usage guidelines published


After a lot of work and a gradual introduction last year, the Plone Foundation has published the official Plone Foundation policy for usage of the Plone logo.

The Plone Foundation encourages use of the Plone logo for marketing and promotion of Plone. The Plone logo usage guidelines are your guide to correct use of the logo, so we can all work on marketing Plone without having to worry about not staying true to the brand or damaging the trademark. We all benefit when the Plone logo and brand are used consistently. Plone's brand recognition grows and the work from community members to promote Plone will benefit the entire Plone user community.

Earlier policy has been unclear if not completely undefined. Without good guidance, many have made their own variations of the Plone logo that are not in line with these guidelines. We encourage everyone who wishes to promote Plone to put an extra effort into making sure their existing and future logo use follows these guidelines.

It is important that we, the Plone community, step up and take responsibility for this immediately now that the policy is official. As we begin enforcing the policy, we really don't want people pointing to current non-compliant usage by "good Plone citizens" as examples showing that it doesn't matter. Several Plone organizations have already based their logo and marketing work on the draft guidelines as they were under development with great results.

We will continue to highlight good examples that the rest of the community and the world can follow — and show that members of the core community are the first to embrace the guidelines and show the way.

You can download the guidelines from here.


New Plone Sites We Like ...

 

Jarn helped Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks launch their new website just in time for the big announcement of MeeGo with Intel at the Mobile World Congress.

High Country News' launched their "40 Years" subsite .  The original site was done by Groundwire <http://groundwire.com>, but the 40 Years site was done by HCN's Project Lead, Ryan Foster.

Know of a Plone-based website that deserves attention?  Send your suggestions to marketing@plone.org to be considered.