PLOG Friday evening report-out

Report-out of today

• Some cleanup tasks for the future identified, fifteen to twenty. Made list of benefits connected to each task. Like: pep8, remove skins usage from core Plone. Risks. Probably setup web page for people or companies to donate money to spend on cleanup, bit like Plone Intranet Consortium. Workers that work for, for example, half the normal wage. Because these are mostly boring tasks, that no one really wants to pick up, not very rewarding of its own. Individual, or group who organises itself. Sponsor can pay you as normal. Do not set up a big organisation. Trust each other.
• Through the web customization, without being horrible. Looked at collective.jbot. Some security issues that need to be considered. That package needs Plone 5 support. ACE editor is useful. Resource folder to add. jbot folder in your diazo theme. Advertise as add-on, not in core, as the approved way to allow these kinds of hacks, with round-tripping. Maybe move to core in the end.
• Increase number of Asian Canadians in Plone. :-) So: diversity meeting. Some are under represented. White males dominate the Plone scene, or at least at the PLOG. But there are some families here, which is very good. Non-native English speakers should feel welcome. At future events, we ask you to look at for newcomers. Connect new people with old-timers. Prioritize first-time speakers at events, help and encourage them. Expand range of talks, like how to run a small business, be a free-lancer. Simple things to make ourselves more attractive to new people.
• Documentation. Explained how we do it.
• Trainings. Three people are willing to give a training at the next conference. Fulvio, Fred, Philip. Beginner, integrator, developer. Master class maybe? Training the trainers. Enable new trainers, tips and tricks, how to set it up and market it. So: we are going to have a Plone Training Team, with me as lead. Increase visibility when people give trainings. Monthly hangouts.
• Translations. Fixed lots of i18n issues. You can start to translate now for Plone 5. We need help figuring out how to extract messages from Javascript.
• Communication with the community. Collection of activity to get into newsletter. Get teams to report regularly and consistently, also about help they may need. Teams should fill out a document about themselves on plone.org. New information in newsletter. Job openings. Recent launches. Contact Christina. Sponsorship. Social media plan, record upcoming events in a calendar. We like to avoid twisting your arm for information that should be shared with the outside world.
• Mosaic is working in Plone 5. Want to do a release this weekend. Alpha release. Various things that do not work yet, but at least you can try it. It changes various things in the rendering engine, like with tiles. Philip: I was mind blown again and again when seeing it today, lost for words.
• Release team. Commit to doing bugfix releases monthly. Let other people release packages. Write nicer combined changelog for each release, more welcoming, more exciting for new developers.
• Plone RESTapi. Created package to use http verbs in the ZPublisher, delegating to browser views. plone.restapi can build on top of that.

General report-out of this week

• Cleaning up bits of the backend, like portal skins, tools, and also simply pep8.
• RESTapi, preparation for frontend.

A bit scary at the beginning of the week, complaining about what does not work, or all the big work that still needs to be done. But there is a plan for the long term future, with sane steps for short and middle term. So rough roadmap is possible and totally compelling. More energy for people who contribute. We can be brave for the next five years, to see a brighter future.

Big cheer for everybody!

Tomorrow: overflow day. You can have more discussions. Or visit Sorrento or other bits of the surroundings. Paul will start compiling some documents in a kind of roadmap, and people are invited to help. Open space about Plone booth at Bilbao. Plone RESTapi.

Maurizio: the board really helped this year, with declaring this a Strategic Summit, and helping in organizing. Thank you all!

[Image by Fred van Dijk.]