Great Progress on Volto at the 2020 Beethoven Sprint

The Beethoven sprint at the end of May was held remotely but came to be a very successful one, focusing on Volto, the new React front end for Plone.

Everybody in the Plone community loves sprints. Not only because of the software we enhance or the code we write. The most crucial ingredient of a great sprint is meeting the people you like and that you haven’t seen in a while. This is harder to do in these coronavirus times, but the Beethoven sprint, held remotely from May 27th through the 30th, succeeded.

There were 34 participants, including substantial representation from kitconcept, RedTurtle, and Eau de Web. They used Discord voice channels throughout the day for a real sprint experience. The channels functioned like tables in a sprint room, where sprinters can go from one table to another to hear what people are discussing. The organizers also used Zoom calls for daily standups and Remo.co video calls in the evenings, which are structured like a bar. Sprinters brought their favorite beverage, good food, relaxed on a couch, and had good conversations in the evenings!

In addition to socializing, lots of work got done. The sprint was all about Volto, which is the new React front end for Plone 6. Highlights included:

  • Bug fixes, date widget improvements, a recurrence widget, a sort function, and work on widget reusability
  • Discussions and progress on a new Volto add-ons architecture based on slots
  • Improvements to Volto's multilingual story, including a test fixture and a translation for Romanian
  • Improvements to the Cypress accessibility test coverage
  • Discussions about Volto's theming story, including how to separate the CMS and public-facing themes
  • A form builder prototype, as well as lots of form builder discussions
  • A Volto listing block that includes sorting, view templates, and a table view
  • Progress on a Dexterity content types control panel for Volto, including a schema editor and RestAPI endpoint
  • Additional Volto training materials, as well as training test drives
  • Volto marketing and onboarding work, including a Volto website and screencasts
  • Discussions and improvements to the Plone backend, including a plone.restapi release
    and work on the thorny problem of a Dexterity site root object
  • Plone 6 roadmap discussions

Thank you to everyone who attended - Plone 6 is getting closer to reality!