Summary of Plone conference 2014 Bristol

During the Plone Conference, as usual, I made summaries. You can see them all by checking the ploneconf2014 tag. I do this for you, with pleasure, but also for myself. Now I can read my own notes and gather my thoughts and remember what I actually heard.

Here are a few highlights.

• Plone 5 is coming. I would be very surprised if a final release is done this year. I would be even more surprised if it did not happen in 2015. I may want to try to redo my own website with the next alpha of first beta version.
• Transmogrifier can be a good way to migrate sites. I have some experience with it already. I may want to use collective.jsonify to migrate my current Plone 2.5 site...
• The new Plone 5 theme is called Barceloneta. It uses Diazo. It uses the new resource registries that you can configure in the Plone UI, replacing the old portal_css and portal_javascript. Your custom Plone 5 themes should do that too.
• A lot is happening in Javascript for Plone. The conference gave food for thought on AngularJS and json. A json api on top of Plone is being worked on, which can help in creating a completely different UI if your website needs it, or it can make showing Plone content in a completely different framework possible. Mockup should be the basis for your widgets or other Javascript work. Quote: We have to get the whole community into thinking 'Javascriptish', really push it into the head of more developers.
• Documentation is (as always) being worked on, including versioning. Using five.grok in code is not officially recommended practice (it should work fine, but too many people in core development do not like its 'magic'), so the documentation that uses it is being copied to a grok-only part and edited in the original location to use best practices.
• The Plone Intranet Consortium is working on improving Plone as an intranet. Several companies are banding together, with online sprints each Wednesday. The plan is to give the license of the code to the Plone Foundation. But for the moment development is tightly controlled so that effort is focused, with a design first approach. Contact us if you want to join.
• The Plone Roadmap team talked about the roadmap and vision for Plone in 2020. Most important is what we want to keep, which is first and foremost: the community. Particularly, the Roadmap Team is the community, which means you. Favorites for changing: have one canonical way to do something (practical: improve plone.api); create a json api to help enable new stuff; improve end user experience.

I had a great time. Thank you, each and every one. Hopefully see you next year in Bucharest.