Report from Midsummer Sprint 2017

Plone Midsummer Sprint was held at Jyväskylä, Finland, on 3rd–7th of July 2017. The main goal for the sprint was to polish content editors' user experience on the current Plone CMS release. The sprint was sponsored by the University of Jyväskylä. In addition, the sprint was accepted to receive strategic funding from Plone Foundation.

There were 18 participants at Midsummer Sprint in total. The participants included, of course, the organizers, the local development team for Plone based and related services, a GSOC student working on a Plone Foundation mentored topic, a professional UX designer and many well known names from the Plone community.

While the sprint was unable to fix as many content editing related issues as was hoped for, it definitely managed to get the best out of its participants:

The local developers submitted their Plone contributor agreements to be able to push their patches upstream, they learned how those patches were made, tested and reviewed in practice, and they got to know many experienced Plone developers in person. They researched and fixed many Plone 5 issues with PloneFormGen.

Maik Derstappen did spectacular work at the sprint by cleaning up and fixing the code base for a major security feature of Plone called safe HTML transform.

Peter Holzer continued on earlier work by Jens Klein and introduced an optional Show Toolbar permission to control when the full toolbar is shown, and an alternative member tools dropdown menu to show a minimal set of required actions (including logout) for logged-in users when the real toolbar is not shown.

Peter Holzer and Asko Soukka redesigned the Translate menu of Plone Multilingual support to be much simpler and more consistent with the other menus in Plone's editing toolbar.

Stephan Klinger championed to implement the PLIP for adding the missing redirection management UI for Plone, based on the existing (but lacking) RedirectionTool add-on.

Eric Steele and Philip Bauer completed the long-awaited refactoring of Plone login forms.

Sven Strack, Paul Roeland and Alexander Loechel worked on better tools for building and testing the documentation, a better theme for the upcoming Plone 5.1 documentation, better readability of the documentation on mobile devices, improved documentation on how to contribute to the Plone documentation and more. In addition, Paul fixed a few reported accessibility issues in Plone 5.

Other interesting developments at the sprint included Maik implementing sub-templates into bobtemplates.plone, Alexander adding tox-based test setup into bobtemplates.plone and Jussi Talaskivi enhancing plone.docker.

Albert Casado completed the design for Pastanaga UI components and composed a visual style guide to help with the reference implementation and later adaptations. Victor Fernández de Alba and Timo Stollenwerk supplemented Albert's work by bootstrapping a ReactJS-based reference implementation of the Pastanaga design.

For more details, see the final report on Plone Midsummer Spring 2017.