PLOG 2017 Roadmap Discussion

Result of discussion at Plone Open Garden 2017 in Sorrento, April 2017

These are the results of the roadmap discussion at the Plone Open Garden 2017 sprint held in Sorrento, Italy, in April 2017.

 

  • Plone 5.1 will be released shortly (currently in beta). See the detailed release notes. 

    • We will end support for the old Archetypes content type framework (Dexterity is the current content type framework) as part of moving Plone to Python 3, which must take place by 2020.

  • Beginning with the Plone 5.1 release, we will warn about the impending end of Archetypes support.

  • Plone 5.2 is projected to include:

    • Zope 4 (currently being worked on)

    • RESTAPI, the plone.restapi interface package that allows JavaScript and other web software to use Plone as a back end service 

  • Accompanying Plone 5.2, we will have some add-ons that make use of RESTAPI, such as:

    • the new Pastanaga user interface design

    • the React JavaScript reimplementation of the Plone user interface (led by Rob Gietema)

    • an Angular JavaScript client front end for web and mobile applications using Plone as a back end service (part of the Plone Headless CMS initiative)

  • Plone 5.3 is projected to include:

    • plone.app.blocks and plone.tiles

    • the Mosaic layout editor (plone.app.mosaic) will continue to work with Plone as an add-on (that is, Mosaic will not be in Plone core)

    • possibly the option to disable portlets, but this would require the "slots" feature from CastleCMS, possibly as an add-on, but requires further investigation

  • Plone 5.4 is projected to include:

    • some Castle CMS features (the recycle bin; repositories for images/files/videos; replacing the "Add New" toolbar menu with an "Add" button that presents a popup dialog box allowing editors to add multiple instances of allowed content types in place; the built-in content quality check on state transitions that checks content for various things)

  • Plone 6 is projected to include these major breaking changes:

    • the new Pastanaga user interface design

    • a complete tile layout solution including content editing, site layouts ("site designs" in Castle CMS terminology), slots (instead of portlets and viewlets), and with Diazo rules disabled (replaced by site designs as implemented in Castle CMS)

    • no more Archetypes support

  • The Plone Headless CMS initiative is well under way; implementations of the Pastanaga user interface design (using either Angular or React, or both) will be released probably before Plone 6.

  • Plone will be able to move to Python 3 since legacy Archetypes support will have been dropped.

  • Reimplement Plone logins to work better with modern distributed/centralized authentication solutions.