Weblog
Closing session
Closing session at the Plone Conference 2015 in Bucharest.
Alec Ghica: I hope you enjoyed the event and your stay in Rumania. Thank you to our sponsors for making this happen. Thank you to my colleagues from all the web. Thank you all the trainers. Thank you Paul for your help organizing everything.
Paul: Thank you Alec! Tomorrow sprint. Coffee at 9:00. Finally: the board has received a nomination for organizing the conference of next year. Step forward Eric and Sally.
Eric and Sally: What do you think of when I say Boston? Red Sox. Patriots. Boston Celtics. Pilgrims. Brakers. Maybe Aerosmith. Blue Man Group. Symphony Orchestra. One of the oldest public libraries. Old North Church. Freedom trail. Boston massacre. USS Constitution tallship. Public gardens. Old cobble stone streets of Beacon Hill. Fall colors. Harvard university. MIT.
But we hope you will be thinking of Plone too. October 17 till 23, 2016, the Plone conference will be in Boston, US. Two venues: MIT Sloan school of management, and Microsoft New England research center. Important: inclusivity, community and collaboration. Power and flexibility of Plone. Strong outreach to new Plone users. Brought to you by Sally, Kim and me, Cris. B there!
Guest blog Fred: Sally Kleinfeldt: Leading with Lead images
Guest blog Fred: Sally Kleinfeldt: Leading with Lead images
The old saying: The cobblers' children have no shoes....
Our own website (Jazkarta) was so outdated, we had to fix it. Now we finally did an upgrade and went straight to Plone 5. There were multiple requirements: more imagery, have tiled landing pages, responsive. To get this together we got together and organised a sprint.
The ingredients for the new site: Dexterity types and behaviors. plone.app.imagecropping, collective.cover, collective.relatedslider and collective.isotope.
With Dexterity, we created two new content types: Projects and Team members. Projects store metadata on the projects with classifications like project type, technology, Location of the project customer. The team members capture the more personal feeling of our company, show who we are.
Critical Dexterity behaviors:
- Images: Use them on Images, projects and team members.
- Related items: for pages, projects and team members.
- The collection behavior was also installed on pages, projects and team members.
- A new behaviour related slider was added as well.
Jazkarta upgraded collective.cover for Plone 5. There's a branch to support it, but it still has to be merged.
collective.relatedslider piggybacks on the related items and collection behaviors to show a slider on the page. Manual items can be done through the related items. But you can add the collection behavior and enter criteria for selecting the items in the slider. relatedslider creates a viewlet below the content. JqueryTools Scrollable from plone.app.jquerytools then shows the image.
collective.isotope provides a new view for Folder and Collection types, using the Isotope Javascript plugin: http://isotope.metafizzy.co. It has an open source license. Demo: it is similar to a faceted search, but then for a smaller number of items with a nice animated behavior, filter on categories, sort by property. It provides vertical and tiled formats, uses the Catalog metadata for filtering and dynamic sorting is on the TODO list. To control the view there are site wide settings.
How to set up the site: define the crop sizes to fit the design. Then start adding content with images. plone.app.imagecropping then allows you to create different crops for every lead image, thumbs for the related sliders and isotope, but preview sizes for, for example, cover tiles. plone.app.imagecropping is awesome and should be in core, but it needs some work. You sometimes don't see when you remove cropping information you have set before and there are some caching issues. Lots of frustation while doing content editing.
Reflections on Plone 5: Nice editing experience with a few glitches. While doing content editing Sally hits view instead of edit and vice versa. And there are no icons visible for add-ons in the toolbar, like collective cover's compose and layout views. The new markup on the Barceloneta thema makes theming easier with less, modifying variables. But the new toolbar makes responsive editing a pain: a fourth column you have to take into account, for example with setting breakpoints.
Questions: About the break points, there are css classes you can use to set up the breakpoints, which you can use with Barceloneta.
[Thanks to Fred van Dijk for this guest blog.]
Roadmap of Plone open space
Roadmap of Plone open space at the Plone Conference 2015 in Bucharest.
[I missed the first part. Lunch!]
Marketing and branding. Well done in Plone 5. Always room for improvement. Board will talk about this, but it is a community job. At Sorrento and later the Board talked about maybe hiring someone to do branding globally, but currently this is not done, we were busy with Plone 5. Sometimes people volunteer, but then do not follow up on it. There can be no one, global marketing message: every country or area has different needs, different ways of communicating what we are. You can edit the posters for your own country, see http://plone.org/foundation/marketing. The message we send out has become less technical and more humanized, which has been well received.
Paragon has just been revived, we will have a list of add-ons that of general interest, high usability, and Plone 5 compatible.
Diversity. Membership committee would like to have more diverse members of the Plone Foundation. Technical skills are not required to become a member. Good to give demos to various persons, so they can get addicted to our community. I head that the first two training days were very good for newcomers, but some then had problems following the talks by all these crazy technical people. But we had hardly any people registered for the web master and end-user training. Reach out to people: we want you here at the conference. You may get more local people for this part, for talks about basic Plone things, you may not travel half the world for that. Note that lots of developers don't know what they can do with Collections and just code it themselves using the catalog, they can benefit a lot from training. Having a 'better half' (family) track on conferences would be good.
Documentation: synchronization between Plone 5 release and documentation would have been good, even simply some notes that most add-ons will not be ready yet. For plips: require to add documentation. Plips should have a skeleton that already has this documentation. Sven and Paul cannot write everything.
Installers. For Windows it is hard. Steve is working on something. He can use help. A system sanity check would be good, at least for missing libraries that we cannot install ourselves in the installer. Maybe something like that is already in there. We have a big download button on plone.org, but having a button for the cloud would be good too. Sven says this is almost ready. Maybe have a distribution with several good add-ons on it, but who is going to maintain this list and the distribution?
Communication. http://plone.slack.com is available, as alternative for irc. Experimental. http://community.plone.com for community discussions and for example for team notes. Email is not really working there, at least not replying, currently. The developer mailing list is still there.
Enterprise search and ZCatalog. We recommend collective.solr. But alm.solrindex also works, right? And has for years. Can be on the recommended list as well, so create a pull request for the docs.
Guest blog Fred: Armin Stross-Radschinski: The future of content?
Guest blog by Fred van Dijk. Talk by Armin Stross-Radschinski at the Plone Conference 2015 in Bucharest.
What is the next disruptive thing coming our way? Difficult to say: streaming video: yes. Apple Newton: wrong timing.
Interactive content could be the next thing. Viewers control the content and choose what to do (next).
Media assets, what do we have now? Text, images, audio, video.
The browser is a stage. Sliders, accordeons, carrousels. Timing matters, video is linear, only one thing to control.
Another example of new interactive content: the scrolling one-pager, where you scroll down a page and there's a parallax effect, scrolling animations, movies. etc. Java and flash enabled these kinds of things earlier but didn't catch on that much. HTML5 and javascript are stronger enablers.
Why is interactive content interesting for business? Offer all the overload of content in different representations. Multichannel publication is another thing: re-use content in different ways. Tell different stories, tell the same story in a different way.
Warning: keep your assets under control, the cloud is a dangerous place for your media. Have a media archive internally. Control metadata. EXIF can be corrupted by external (cloud services). Also usage and license tracking is difficult if not impossible with many cloud hosting services. The best future is now: the browser has become very powerful.
Digital signage: public screen, led walls, info screens. But you need a CMS as a backend to provide the data. Display devices have become powerful: PDF display, 3D, panoramic images. Audio/Video. And you can do this on mobile phones, tablets, pc sticks you just insert in the back of your TV.
Something else that's coming: gamification. Interactive solutions, touch is getting common to interact with content. Don't overdo control though, sometimes people want to relax and sit back to enjoy the content.
Panoramic views are quite old already: viewmaster toys, 3D stereo images with special goggles and the stereoscope. New VR technologies allow to give viewers an overview of an area or geography, but imaging showing an overview of content, documents, images on a virtual 3D wall in front of you. Or overlay reality with computer content.
Devices now: Google Glass, Oculus Rift. Expensive, but costs start to decrease. Google Cardboard. In 2016 the consumer version of Oculus Rift will be coming. VR viewers widen your horizon. A monitor only gives you a very small view angle. But a headset will scroll when you move your head, giving you the illusion of a huge view angle and it will become an immersive experience.
Navigation in 3D. New input devices: display control items as overlays in the virtual environment, when you look at control links you can jump to them. The CMSes will have to support these new controls and directives, with extra assets and application settings to control these 3D devices. 3D impresses: it's like being there, the context is always right and memorizing (the experience) is more intense.
Plone will need to adapt to make this future happen and support new approaches and integrate these technologies. There's more than the web. Plone already has a lot: secure base functionality, can deal with unstructured data, python to script a lot, workflow process control.
[Thanks to Fred van Dijk for this guest blog.]
Lightning talks Friday
Lightning talks on Friday at the Plone Conference 2015 in Bucharest.
Jens Klein and Christine Baumgartner: Castle Sprint
A message from the prince. Castle in Goldegg, near Vienna. Next year Plone is fifteen years old. We will go back to our foundations. We will organize another Castle Sprint, with Phil Auersberg. We will announce more at the end of the year. Sprint will be around end Spetember, beginning October next year. Will be a small invent. We will be sure to invite Alex Limi and others.
Sven Strack: mr.docs
mr.docs tests documentation. Uses docker with properly configured Sphinx installed. With this in combination with mr.butler I have started testing the plone core packages. I will start sending mails to the last committer when you broke the package.
Joel Lambilotte: IMIO
Created by Belgian government. We write Plone software for local authorities. An organization was needed so we can share software: local authorities usually do not do this, as they are competing with each other. IMIO has more than 240 members, more than 60 percent of the Walloon communities.
Chris Lozinski
Zope ZMI sprint starting today. Demonstration of the J templating language.
Christine Baumgartner: Alpine City Sprint
At the end of January, welcome in the Alps!
Gil Forcada: World Plone Office Day
Each last Friday of the month: work on Plone. We have entry-level tasks ready so newcomers can join. Talk about it on social media, get on irc. You can meet with each other, maybe join forces with a few companies that day. Thanks!
Philip Bauer: migration of custom types
Plone is awesome. Say you have a custom archetypes content type. Install plone.app.contenttypes. Your custom type is still editable. On the new content types you can enable all kinds of behavior, so you want this for your content type too. You go to the @@custom_migration view, select your old content type, a new content type, some fields to migrate, and Plone will migrate your content items.
There is no need to write custom migrations yourself, just use this, and report issues if you encounter them, and we will help you.
Simone Orsi, Matt Hamilton: Plone Open Garden
PLOG is the best way to get in touch with the Plone community. We organize it every year in the Italian spring. Speakers, a garden to talk about Plone, sprinting. What is Plone for you? Find out in Sorrento! Family oriented event, you can bring wife, husband, kids.
Eric Brehault: Empowering users
We have a powerful theming tool, excellent, good. But users need more. They need to be able to create dynamic blocks, insert those into the page. They can do html, Python, but don't know viewlets, portlets, tiles, thingies. Now they can use Rapido. Rapido extends the theming editor. Create a folder, add html, simple python, use Diazo or Mosaic to include it, and it is going to work. You can use plone.api in your python code. It has a ready-to-use json backend, with full REST api. You can add content rules with hooks for it.
Jonas Baumann: ftw FTW
At 4teamwork we have made some handy tools for testing.
With ftw.builder you can easily create content and users in tests.
ftw.testbrowser allows to use lxml and css selectors in your tests. Also use browser.debug() to open the page in a real browser.
Victor Fernandez de Alba: new plone.org
Showing the current state of the new plone.org that is under construction. We will still integrate several stats, like github commits. Contributor profiles. We will work more on this during the sprint.
Maik Derstappen: CMS Garden
CMS Garden is a foundation, a joint venture of open source CMSes. We did quite a lot of events. Bigger than Microsoft and Telekom at the German LinuxTag for example. Starting 30 October this year we will have our first 'unconference' in Essen, Germany. Welcome to our garden!
We have produced a brochure with information on open source CMSes. If you are interested in organizing something in your own country, contact us.