Matt Hamilton and Eric Steele - The State of Plone

This is a talk from the Plone conference 2012.

Matt Hamilton and Eric Steele hold the keynote speach on the State of Plone.

Matt Hamilton is the current President of the Plone Foundation. Eric Steele is the Plone 4 release manager.

So, what has happened the last twelve months? Sometimes you think nothing has happened, but when you start writing it down you get really excited because so much is actually going on. This year a Plone Konferenz in Munich, Plone Symposium South America, Plone Open Garden in Sorrento, Plone Symposium East in the US. So several regional conferences in local languages, which is fantastic. In total between five and six hundred attendees. These are grass roots events, not coordinated by the Plone Foundation, which is good. At this Plone Conference, there are people from 27 different countries. We can be proud of our global diversity.

We have had the Plone 4.2 release and 4.3 is now in alpha. A lot is done during sprints. We average one major Plone sprint per month currently. 5597 commits in the past year, 208 contributors. The past month saw 66 people committing to the core of Plone, with 13 of them being new. We will probably break that record this month. We loose some people who move on to new projects, but there are still more people coming in than have left. The Plone core development list is very active.

There are fourteen new members in the Plone Foundation. These are members who have made major contributions to Plone.

World Plone Day had lots of activities worldwide. We can use more events and developers and users in North Africa, Middle East, India.

We had our sixtieth Plone TuneUp online event, shepherded by Carol Ganz from Six Feet Up. Lots of tickets have been closed. In just that last day, 34 tickets have been solved.

We have the Plone Roadmap. The roadmap team created this ongoing document, which is a high level summary of goals of what we want to do with Plone. Some goals may shift. We want to iterate, have more frequent releases. Introduce new technologies early, before they become the standard. We want to be more aggressive about moving under-used and under-maintained features out of core. We want to keep sane upgrades, instead of possibly breaking backwards compatibility in Plone 5.

Plone has moved to github. All of Plone core has moved, making merges, patches, pull requests much easier. Much of the collective has moved too.

There is a new Windows Installer, which is often the first impression a new user gets. Enfold has done a lot of work here. Ross Patterson has been working on getting a much more native installer. The installer uses the same base buildout as other installers. We have been looking at managed cloud deployment options. We have Bitnami, Turnkey, Ploud.

Elizabeth Leddy and Karl Johann Kleist have been cleaning up the Plone Trac, the ticket system, cleaning up tags, reassigned bugs. Fantastic, really helpful. We have made the bug report form simpler. A QA team triages tickets, checking if they are valid and clear.

Timo Stollenwerk leads an effort on automated testing. This is about maintaining code quality. Jenkins is a big part of this. Recently Travis-CI. We are starting to use the Robot Framework, which helps for testing javascript, which is very much needed with the amount of javascript code we have.