Relations in Plone are incredibly powerful. It has lots of sophisticated options. But Plone does not use most of them. Plone here is like a toddler in a Lamborghini.

You can use relations in fields, and Plone also uses two relations without fields:

• working copy (iterate)
• linkintegrity checking

There are at least nine packages required to build one simple relation. Is that okay? My answer: yes, that's all fine. Why? It is stable, very fast, very flexible (more than Plone needs), and documented. Well, the documentation is difficult.

What's new in Plone?

1. We now have a sane Python api for relations:

   api.relation.create
   api.relation.get
   api.relation.delete
   

Get all friends who have a relation with Bob:

api.relation.get(target=bob, relationship="friend)

Get all relations of Alice:

api.relation.get(source=alice)

Create a relation between Bob and Alice and store it on a field with name "friend" if it exists:

api.relation.create(source=bob, target=alice, relationship="friend")

You can use this in Plone 5 on Python 3. On Python 2 you can use the similar collective.relationhelpers.

2. We have a controlpanel for relations.

You can inspect relations and back relations. It also has a magic "Rebuild" button. This will purge all relations, and restore them. This is useful, especially after an in-place migration, to get rid of broken relations.

In Plone 6 this is built in. In Plone 5 you can use `` collective.relationhelpers`` but you need to remember the url of the controlpanel.

3. Helpers to manage, inspect and rebuild relations.

See from Products.CMFPlone import relationhelper.

4. Better and more relation fields

There are default relation fields with default widgets, but you now have more choices for the widgets.

A nice helper is the new StaticCatalogVocabulary that you can use a vocabulary.

Documentation and examples:

• example.contenttype.
• https://training.plone.org/5/mastering-plone-5/relations.html

You can also do relation fields without relations: store a uuid instead of a relation value. You can use a schema.Choice field with a RelatedItemsFieldWidget. But watch out: when you delete a content item that this field points to, Plone will do no cleanup for you. For relations, this does happen.

What about Volto?

• The related items field is not displayed.
• RelationChoice is broken
• None of the new widget types work

We need to fix those, and I have filed issues for them. Also, we may want to have an endpoint in plone.restapi to query relations.

As a kid, I played tennis. I was taught to hit the ball hard, and as close as possible over the net. Nowadays, trainers tell you to hit the ball slower, hit it longer, giving you more control, with topspin. So that is a trade-off between power and control.

A traditional, classic CMS is usually stuck in the past. Using dead technologies, like jQueryUI, an old stack. That is partially true for Plone 5 as well, although it looks prettier than most of the others.

WordPress uses the Gutenberg editor. Whenever I try out WordPress again, I keep having the feeling: I am not smart enough for this. I add a few images, and want to make them look the same size. They have lots of controls for that. Eventually I succeed, because I am a web developer. For text, you can choose lots of sizes and colors.

But: I am not a designer. I can accidentally pick a color combination that does not work for colorblind people. I don't know all this, so I tinker around and end up with a bad product.

The web is hard. You need a consistent design. Designers themselves are specialized into UI or UX. It needs to be responsive.

Plone 6 is not a classic CMS. It is a modern CMS providing both power and easy of use, and I think it is the only enterprise CMS that offers this.

Albert Casado created the Pastanaga UI. In the toolbar you see options to add or edit or order content, and the rest is still there, but hidden. For image alignment we show four options, and for size three options. This is simple, but it already gives you twelve possible combinations.

The Plone 6 UI is all about blocks, blocks, blocks. Responsive design means you usually have only one column, instead of the three that you can have in Plone 5.2. That single column will be a stream of blocks.

In Plone 6 you can use grid layouts. We started from scratch a couple of times on this, but we have something good now.

We have a teaser block. This is often used for landing pages. You add a teaser block that is linked to an existing content item, and it will show its image, title, description.

Plone 6 will ship with a few default blocks, like text, image, video, table of contents, etcetera. There are about a hundred Plone packages on npm now which have their own blocks. The Plone company Eau de Web works for the EEA (European Environment Agency) and they open source all their blocks, for example a faceted search block. RedTurtle created a forms block. Some others did as well, and then we usually cooperate and end up with an improved version.

We have "No Code Content Types". You can create contenttypes TTW in Plone, but what was always missing, was templates so you can customize how they look. We now have that.

The Volto frontend that will be in Plone 6 is in production use since 2019. A top German government institution uses Plone 6, American universities, Osaka University in Japan, EEA in Europe, many municipalities in Italy.

Today you can use battle tested Plone 5.2 plus Plone REST api plus Volto. That is already Plone 6-ish. You can also use the real Plone 6 alpha release.

In the past, all Plone versions were supported for many many years, but we never really advertised it. Now the Release Team and Security Team have said they will support Plone 6 for at least five years.

If you are not ready yet and need more time before you jump on Volto, then you can use Plone Classic UI. There is no need to rush, we have got you covered.

Summary: Plone 6 provides something really unique.

How can we efficiently develop a Plone backend? What do we expect from the tooling?

• Should be easy to adopt for new developers
• reduced development time
• following best practices
• provide test infrastructure and basic tests

These are our two friends:

• plonecli
• plone-snippets for VS Code

plonecli is a command line tool, installed with pip together with bobtemplates.plone, here version 6.0b10. With it, you iteratively enhance your add-on.

Let's create a restaurant add-on with a content type for the menu data, a vocabulary for the menu category, control panel, plus a bit more.

Demo:

plonecli create addon collective.restaurant
cd collective.restaurant/
plonecli add controlpanel

Open Visual Studio Code (my preferred editor) and edit the created controlpanel.py. Add a field: a list of categories. Now add a vocabulary for this:

plonecli add vocabulary

Edit menu_category.py to let this get the contents of the controlpanel field from the registry.

Add two content types: Menu and Menu Item:

plonecli add content_type

Edit menu_item.py. When you have plone-vs-snippets installed in VS Code, it is easy to add fields. Add a photo (NamedBlobImage), menu_category (Choice with your menu vocabulary name).

Edit the types/*.xml files to enable behaviors like plone.basic and plone.namefromtitle.

Now get a local environment, mostly by running buildout, and start the instance, with:

plonecli build
plonecli serve

On http://localhost:8080 create a Plone Site and activate collective.restaurant and plone.restapi. Go to the Restaurant control panel and add a few categories, like Starters, Main, Desserts. Now you can add a Menu folder and add menu items in various categories.

The basic data is available through the REST api. But we want more. Add a service RelatedDishes:

plonecli add restapi service

Edit api/services/related_dishes/get.py and use api.content.find to look for other Menu Items with the same category.

To make searching easier, edit profiles/default/catalog.xml. With the Plone VS code snippets, you can agains easily add a catalog index here. We will need an upgrade step to apply this:

plonecli add upgrade_step

Restart, reindex, and it works.

Please help by contributing templates to bobtemplates.plone or create an issue when you think a template can be improved. Or create an own similar package, like bobtemplates.migration.

Ideas for the future:

• Rest API support question in addon template
• Rest API sub-templates for serializer and deserializer
• support for Mosaic tiles
• graphical UI (ncurses) to make choices easier

I have been working alongside of the documentation training teams the past months. In this talk I will tell you about the past, present and future of these. Of course, I follow this with a call to contribute!

I am just a messenger. Discussions can get heated between developers when talking about how to document things. Don't shoot the messenger.

https://plone.org should use Plone 6, with default frontend Volto. Rikupekka Oksanen will talk about that tomorrow.

We made a couple of talks for Plone Conference 2020. This talk is basically a summary of the story behind modernize Plone's classic UI + Theming based on this work. We're going to show how to create a theme for Plone 6 Classic UI based on Barceloneta and from scratch.

In discussions during several Plone events, we saw that everyone tried to use Bootstrap, including its components. We wanted to use bootstrap variables in Plone, instead of having our own definitions with slightly different names.

We and others made several PLIPs, Plone Improvement Proposals:

• Modernize markup in templates
• Modernize default theme, Barceloneta LTS
• Modernize javascript to ES6

We want to make things easier. Creating a modern UI for the web is complex. You need to support different devices. Users expect things to work in a certain way, because they have seen it on many other sites.

From a developer perspective:

• You expect one way to do things.
• Developers should not have to worry about design, markup. You just want to use a component.
• Find examples in (Bootstrap) documentation and just copy it.

In Plone 6, the default UI is Volto. But Classic UI will remain there for years, so it had to be updated. For starters: Bootstrap 5. It is the most used framework. If you don't use it, you miss out on a lot of fun.

• There is support for custom properties, also known as CSS variables.
• SVG icon library
• vanilla javascript, no jQuery
• dropped IE10 and IE11 support.

In Plone 6 Classic UI:

• Templates updated to Bootstrap 5.
• They use the Bootstrap components as documented.
• Barceloneta theme uses an opinionated set of bootstrap variables.

Demo site is on https://6-classic.demo.plone.org/

TTW theming:

• No more Through The Web compilation.
• You can sill upload a zip with a theme.
• Support for custom css via theming controlpanel, via a simple form which is already there in Plone 5.2.

Filesystem based theming:

• plonetheme-barceloneta-base as npm package
• We have updated bobtemplates.plone using that package. Use plonecli to create an add-on package and then let it add a theme to your package.
• Three options: you inherit from Barceloneta or create from scratch or use Diazo.
• Compile the scss with npm.
• Diazo is still there and works like before.

Javascript:

• The javascript no longer uses RequireJS.
• We updated jQuery, although you do not need it much anymore.
• No more TTW build.
• Mockup was udpated to ES6, based on patternslib.
• Resource Registries is there, but the TTW compilation is gone.
• There are basically only bundles, no resources.
• You no longer have to create manual timestamps. The webresource library creates automatic hashes instead.

How to deal with icons?

• We use bootstrap icons by default.
• Icons are loaded as inline SVG.
• We have icons for content types, Plone UI icons, toolbar, mimetypes with fallback.
• Registration is done in plone.staticresources, in XML.
• Use in a template:

<tal:icon replace="structure icons.tag('love', tag_class='custom-class', tag_alt='foobar')" />

Can you insert icons in content?

• You could copy SVG into HTML, though it is not so nice.
• Planned is a TinyMCE pluging to select and add an icon.
• But discussion is in progress.

Custom icons in Plone:

• Try out collective.fontawesome
• Register SVG icons as resource.
• Add XML to register icon names.
• Setup a profile for an icon font, but that is also part of discussion.

Further:

• Typography and overall look is modernized.
• Especially the Event, File and Image content type look nicer.
• Control panel has much bigger icons.
• We made sure it looks good on mobile devices.

How to theme:

• https://training.plone.org is updated, and we used it on Saturday
• https://docs.plone.org will be updated pretty soon.

Talk to us on Plone Discord in the #classic-ui room.