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Sprint topics

published Oct 31, 2009

Presentation of sprint topics for the Plone Conference 2009 in Budapest

Sprint list is on the conference website: http://www.ploneconf2009.org/program/sprint

Limi's work list:

  • I am going to work on the sunburst theme, completing the css, integrate jquerytools, testing in all browsers.
  • Figure out packaging strategy for Plone 5, decide on theme selection.

Limi's wish list:

  • Our template customization story and jbot.
  • Testing and updating add-on products for Plone 4. Key to the success of Plone 4.
  • Next generation CacheFu: five.caching. CacheFu was built for Plone 2.1
  • I want LinguaPlone to love Dexterity.
  • Look into http://stackoverflow.com to answer questions instead of the plone-users list. Theme it with xdv. There are a lot of frustrated .net developers on stack overflow, so it is good if they see us.
  • QA on collective.xdv (binary eggs on Mac).
  • Reduce KSS dependency.
  • Timezone support
  • HttpOnly cookies in Plone 4
  • Make all tests exercise unicode in Plone 4. Don't just add ascii as title when testing a portlet. Add umlauts, harts, etc.
  • Scripts to build VMWare and Amazon and ISO images from the Unified Installer.
  • Nightly performance tests. See if performance suddenly drops after a recent change. Talk to me if you want a list of things to check.
  • Version ping daily or weekly to see what versions people are using. Opt-in.
  • Typogrify filter. Python script to change -- into something prettier.
  • Collections UI improvements. It is so much better in Plone 4. Rob and Geir have worked on this, so get pointers from them if you want to work on this.
  • Better commenting system
  • css improvements for plone.org and Trac
  • Marketing:
    • Get a nice Plone 4 feature overview
    • Make comparisons of Plone versus other systems. Not one-sided things; guide people into using the right tool.
    • Move plone-announce to Feedburner. We have about 500 to 1000 addresses that have to be subscribed over from plone-announce to Feedburner.
  • Clean out the issue tracker.
  • Reproduce bugs, close irrelevant ones (like for NuPlone which we are not going to fix).

Topics by others

  • Wolfgang: LinguaTools, helper set of rules which allow doing things to multiple translations of an object in one go, to avoid repetitive work. We want to make it nicer, more watertight, more modular, we want more tests.
  • David: we find E-commerce difficult. We want to make PloneGetPaid easier, and want to move it to the collective.
  • Andreas Zeidler: Plone 4 performance. Blob support, unified folders. Fix remaining bugs, update documentation about how to enable blob-related fields. If you have a large zodb with files, please donate it for testing.
  • Tom: funkload automated performance testing.
  • Tom: git integration for Plone core developers.
  • Charlie Clark: core CMF, folder listing view based on formlib
  • David Glick: Update add-on products to Plone 4; don't wait till Plone 4 is released. We can assist you now. Document common problems. Make list of products that are Plone 4 compatible.
  • Otto, an http publisher without the overhead.
  • Rob Gietema: Deco, Dexterity integration.
  • Mike Holm: develop a better presence for education, build a website to give info to groups working in the education sector.
  • Several people: make video content of first-class citizin. Plumi, p4a video, best of breed video problems, create a definitive buildout config. Plone 5 will have tiles for audio and video. Also: we have catering and coffee all day.
  • Nate Aune: Banjo, point-and-click easy theming in Plone with Deliverance. Find me with the video sprinters.
  • Dylan Jay: hostout, deploy Plone to any server you want with one command. I want Amazon ootb, figure out some best practices. Integrate with the ZopeSkel UI.
  • Amberjack, tutorial tour product. We could help some help from someone who knows kupu.
  • Ramon Navarro: multilingual, LinguaPlone for Dexterity, relations.
  • Carsten Senger: content import and export for Plone. transmogrifier. How many options are really necessary, what could the UI be.
  • Jens Klein: AGX modeling framework, python egg generation part, generate Dexterity types.
  • Chris Calloway: ZopeSkel, had a BBQ sprint three weeks ago, we have som work left from that, package up the web interface, templates for Plone 4, Dexterity, WSGI, refactored into sub packages, documentation, fix mailing list.
  • Christian Scholz, (MrTopf): social media.
  • Bruno: Singing and Dancing
  • Jordan Baker: roadrunner fast testing framework, not working so well with Plone 4 and Dexterity, we want to add tests, continuous integration server, Mac OS.
  • PloneSocial, RPX (OpenId-like)

Meet up in the hallways, the open area where we gathered the whole week, and talk to the topic leaders.

Lighting Talks Friday

published Oct 30, 2009

Lighting talks on the last day of the Plone Conference 2009 in Budapest, not counting the weekend sprint. A big thank you to Balasz Ree and all the others!

Robert Niederreiter: agx

agx does tree transformation with python.

Pawel Lewicki: ZPublisher.Client.Object

Get the real zodb object via url:

ZPublisher.Client.Object('http://.../obj', user, pass)

Nate Aune: ContentMirror

Push zodb data to a relational database.

Slides: http://jazkarta.com/contentmirror-lightning-talk.pdf

Fred van Dijk: Rapucation

Project for a school. Music teacher. Teenagers do not care about classical music, just videos. So let them make rap videos: rapucation. Let them share and react with others.

  1. LinguaPlone only shows Dutch content when you watch the site in Dutch. But we want them to see German and English reactions as well. So we tweaked LinguaPlone. Set Language='all' in all calls to the portal_catalog. And we did some tweaks for ordering.
  2. Don't store the video in Plone. We used ftp.streamingprovider.com and tweaked the urls that are shown.
  3. Notify reviewers by email. Use content rules for that. plone.app.contentrules.

See http://rapucation.eu/

Slides: http://www.zestsoftware.nl/presentations/rapucation.pdf

Steve McMahon: Plone Education

Book by Erik Rose: Plone 3.0 for Education

Mikko Ohtamaa: Plone Developer documentation

Chris Calloway: "We need less innovation and more documentation for a while."

There is a lot of knowledge around, but tacit knowledge needs to become explicit knowledge.

  1. Write down problem.
  2. Write down answer.

http://plonemanual.twinapex.com/

Package: collective.developermanual

Andrew Mleczko: Content import

How to import 120,000 documents in 8.43 minutes? Idea: only create the catalog brains. Let users create the real data later. Some dummy objects and a traverser later we are done very fast!

Andreas Zeidler: collective.solr

SOLR is a search engine. collective.solr does integration in Plone. Andy did a demo.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.solr

Andrew Carter: Plumi

Plumi is video sharing: http://EngageMedia.org Based on ATVideo. We want to sprint on Plumi this weekend.

See http://blog.plumi.org/

Florian Friesdorf: mr.developer

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mr.developer written by Florian Schulze. Check out packages in your buildout.

git-svn and gitify. Central svn, local git! In mr.developer you have some new options now: revision and pkg_base.

Sjoerd: Deco

I am a student at Four Digits. Assignment: create forms and interface for adding/editing application tiles to Deco. Integrate it with Dexterity. Create rendering engine to render the page. I have made progress and want to sprint on it.

Testing in Plone

published Oct 30, 2009

Open space

Testing tutorial: http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/testing

Look at the tests in Plone itself, or at third party products. Find a product that does something similar and look at its tests.

If a product is not tested at all, a good way to start is add testbrowser tests to just create a content type of that product.

Use pdb in doctests: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/doctestpdbhacks

The p4a packages have good doctests.

The danger of doctests is that you get neither good documentation nor good tests.

Patrick Gerken: Grease monkey script for hiding code examples and showing more links on pypi: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50614

The paster templates could add a bit more documentation about how to test.

collective.testcaselayer should help avoid some of the boiler plate code needed.

Hanno created plone.recipe.alltests to run all tests of the packages you selected.

z3c.testsetup should do the same.

You can use nose for tests.

In a pdb in your tests you can start a zope server where you can use your browser to click through the site:

>>> from Testing.ZopeTestCase.utils import startZServer
>>> startZServer()
('127.0.0.1', 55143)

Quality assurance for third party products

published Oct 30, 2009

Open space

When a customer has installed 25 extra products and wants me to migrate his site, I want to be able to give him a good idea of how hard that is going to be, how much trouble, without needing to be convincing. Do the products have tests? Is there good test coverage?

On pypi you can see how many times a package has been downloaded. Gives an indication.

I want at least some automatic information, like number of tests, coverage.

It takes about one or two hours per package to configure a buildbot. You can grab statistics from that. Maybe automatically run pyflakes and pep8 tests.

Each package has an owner.

We can calculate a value for a package, like lines of code times the coverage. Can be touchy.

Perhaps create a directory buildbot in the collective, where people can put buildout config files for their packages.

It is better to have a src directory in a package instead of having the code next to the setup.py file.

Add automatically collected information to PloneSoftwareCenter.

Could be tricky to prevent someone uploading code to the collective that is then executed by the buildbot and for instance starts sending spam.

Show translation coverage.

We should not do rating (yet).

Look at the pylint package.

You can make pyflakes less complaining.

pep8 and pyflakes tests could be optional.

Action points, we can sprint on this:

  • get buildbot infrastructure
  • add fields to PSC for code coverage, and number of tests; could be annotations
  • POST request for writing the info there from the buildbot
  • scripts to parse the buildbot output and post the info

Plone Quality Assurance Team

published Oct 30, 2009

Open session about QA for the Plone core

Plone 3.3 had about 6 months of prereleases. Very little testing and feedback coming in, very late. Shouting "Please test!" did not help. If companies were using prereleases and it was working fine you only heard it when you explicitly asked it.

Several browser tests are missing, like for collections, which is why they were broken for two releases. Also Selenium tests.

Hanno was looking at all the bugs, reassigning them. Very useful, but too much for one single person.

Another task would be specifically testing just before or after a release.

Having data about how many times the versions.cfg of a release candidate is downloaded would be handy. Getting no negative feedback but also no positive feedback is not good. Are there no problems or is no-one using it.

Having a list of things to do before a release is handy.

Testing a release candidate during the Plone TuneUps is good. Make some noise about that.

InstallFest: get people to try out the installers and be available on irc for support.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mr.ripley: replay the requests of a live site on a staging server.

Idea: button "Ready for Plone 4" for third party products on plone.org?

Buildbots for the most popular third party products?

Important things to do:

  1. Triaging bugs.
  2. Get people to test releases.

Tell Joanna when a new release is coming up so we could use testers in the Plone TuneUp.

Get a list of which things to change when a new release is there, like also the topic of the #plone irc channel.

Test coverage runs for packages are interesting as well.