PLOG Tuesday afternoon

Kim Nguyen presents results from the Strategic Summit Survey

35 results back. Mostly: developer, solution provider, site-admin, deployer. Mostly North America and Europe, a couple from Asia, Africa, South America, Caribbean or world wide. Most have ten or more years of experience with Plone. Majority is not a Plone Foundation member. Some of you should be.

Now to some answers by those people.

What should be on the technical agenda? Nothing: this should be an open discussion of the future of the product. API. Plone 5 release. Moving away from Zope 2 and CMF. Making Plone more customizable through the web, easier to get started. Block editing, mosaic, tiles. Improving learning curve for developers, making it easier to come on board. Plone Intranet, Patternslib, Mockup, Python 3 (one), Continuous Integration. Refocus Plone as secure workflow tool, not necessarily a CMS. Replace catalog with SOLR. Better custom themes. Sidebar UI, some of the choices around this. Better mobile theming out of the box, use for mobile applications.

What should be on the non technical agenda? Marketing, visibility, promotions, formalise it, maybe professionalise? New plone.com and plone.org, get your success stories or your provider on it. Better communication from sprints, team leaders to the community and to marketing or external audiences. Get more money for the Plone Foundation. Who is the target user, client, customer? Concerns about upgrade from Plone 4. Be more welcoming to developers and other contributors. Monthly global sprints, similar to the earlier Plone TuneUps, re-energize the community. Releasing Plone 5. Better sustained documentation and consolidation, more help needed there. Consolidated bug tracking, merging into one place. Better Plone training, getting new people up to speed. Improve collaboration with Python, Pyramid, Django, Javascript communities. Decision process for PLIPs and their inclusion.

What should be the outcome of the summit? Roadmap, structured plan. Vision, better marketing. Plone 5 ship date (six months?). New community energy and synergy.

Paul Roeland and Eric Steele: summarizing complaints

• TinyMCE showing its age.
• People being spoiled by Google Docs.
• Where to do content editing.
• Scheduling content, how that works, expiring.
• Old and new style collections do different things. Difficult programmatically.
• Documentation: dexterity without Grok is not documented well, if at all.
• Sorting portlets. There is an add-on though.
• Deploying to different sites. Some add-on as well, so: notifying people what add-ons are available.
• ZCatalog takes ages, indexing, reindexing, unindexing.
• Adapters are hard to grasp as concept for new developers.
• Changing a label in a dexterity behavior for just one content type is not possible.
• Difficult to find Plone devs to hire, to train up new devs.
• Nobody wants to touch Zope and CMF parts.
• Collective add-ons, hard to get overview.
• How to get extra content on the page. Several ways.
• Plone complexity makes estimating a project complex.
• Editing complex pages. Deco, cover, mosaic.
• Concerns about migration process to Plone 5.
• Challenging to keep up with what is happening in community.
• Where are we at and where are we going.
• Clients like concrete release dates.
• What to do with the underlying stuff. More boring, but somebody needs to do that, clean it up.
• Not good as community at making decisions, which means nothing gets thrown away.
• Look at it from a business standpoint: how much would it cost to support Archetypes, how much to drop it, etcetera. Cost of current inefficiency is high, you can be bug hunting for hours. Cost of throwing lots of stuff away, is also high. Starting from scratch is very costly as well.
• Feature changes ending up in bug fix releases.
• LDAP integration is bad.
• Not updating outdated documentation.

Eric Steele: Plone 5

There is a buildout for the first beta. Mockup has had issues with frequent rewrites. Control panels have now been modernized, using z3c.form and the configuration registry. plone.app.contenttypes is in there. Migrations for standard content types is working, for custom content types it is there but needs more love and/or money; you still have to write your own content types, views, templates of course. Dexterity is default content type story. New Barceloneta theme. Improved folder contents tab.

We have completely rewriting the way we use Javascript in Plone. Using more modern techniques, like RequireJS. A new Resource Registries panel in the Plone UI to edit this. You can edit less variables through the web, kind of like the old base_properties. We are now able to use more modern widgets, without needing to maintain outdated ones ourselves.

When will it be out? The more you test it and report bugs, the earlier we can ship it.

Eric and Paul: Community and communication

We have semi-regular team leader meetings. We are putting notes up on http://community.plone.org. There are lots of duties to take on, certainly also for non-core developers. You are very welcome.

Documentation is in reorganisation. Restructuring documentation that was already there. The documentation team is not the one to write a doc about say creating a dexterity content type without Grok. Someone else will need to write it, and we can then help getting it more understandable, in better English, etcetera. You do not need to be good at writing, you just need to write.

A lot of the teams are currently one person. We need to do a better job of getting more people in. Some people are in multiple teams, overcommitted, like Timo and Ramon.

Víctor Fernández de Alba is working on new plone.org, mostly on his own. Migrating some of the content using transmogrifier. Using Plone 4, with plone.app.contenttypes. Documents, events, news, images, files are migrated, PloneSoftwareCenter will not be used anymore, so that content will not be migrated. We wanted to have the PLIP process on plone.org, so we no longer need dev.plone.org. Maybe profile page for Plone contributors, listing which teams they belong to, other information. Maybe we want to rework the theme, change the landing page. Should be discussed, maybe during these days. Package is plone.org.core. You can see on github what is left and what is done.

Paul: dev.plone.org is now spam-free again, mainly thanks to Chrissy Wainwright. Down to about 600 tickets to export and import to github. There is a way of moving tickets from one github repo to another, and a way of creating a ticket in an initial spot when you do not know where it should be reported. Needs a champion, someone to do it and/or slave drive others into doing it. Are you good at scripting, with at least minimal people skills, please step forward. Even better: a group of people.

Eric: https://community.plone.org is being used. We need to make the decision to flip the switch to make this the main forum. Yes, we will switch it this Friday. Not the developer list though.

Paul: http://paragon.plone.org is a site for searching the very best Plone add-ons. There is a jury. Work still needs to be done. Also: get your setup.py classifiers correct so they mention Plone and the Plone version, and they will show up in a list here as well.

Kim Nguyen: http://plone.com is live, soft-released. We used an issue tracker and systematically used it, filed and assigned tickets. We had weekly meetings to keep on track and to keep us honest. It is so important, it re-energizes people. Please step up in a project, help a little bit. [Christian Theune: Too many people working on their own: create a bigger team again, so people do not get stuck in their own little corner. It helped us a lot.] We want more success stories. We want to hear from you if you think the message needs more refinement. To get your provider up on plone.org, contact us and become a sponsor. It is a small amount, we want it to be affordable also if you are in an area of the world where you do not make a lot of money. The goal is not to get a lot of money from this, just to get an up to date list. Translations: we will discuss it on Thursday. If you want to be a part of plone.com as your country, contact us. Also fine to have your own site, like the Dutch http://plone.nl

Paul: documentation is there, but it is mostly for Plone 4. Plone 5 is getting closer, so this needs updating. Looking into getting robot tests for screen shots. That is actually easy to add in your code when you have something that is worthy of a screen shot. We will be contacting you about that,

Christina McNeill: one-person communication team. Plone Newsletter has been there for a year. About 160 subscribers. 80 percent is actually reading it, which is really high according to mailchimp. Marketing is not really my area of expertise, so we can use someone there. [Philip: please add a nicely visible button on the plone.org homepage to subscribe.]

Philip Bauer: David Glick and Tres Seaver have recently been working on getting Zope parts to run on Python 3. Is there a master plan? Eric: no.

Asko Soukka: Mosaic. We are working on it. It may be doing too much. May be hard for people to decide whether to use something in Mosaic versus Diazo. Lots of things in tiles are broken for lots of reasons, needing work. Many concepts. Store site-layouts as content types. Needs specific versions of plone.app.widgets and plone.app.events. There is a PLIP configuration to run it on Plone 5 in the core development buildout. Ramon: it works fine, but I am not trying to finish it for production. Philip: Mosaic should be a priority for us, let's not wait until our javascript story is completely finished. Crowd: do not try to do this on Plone 4 anymore, only on Plone 5. Asko: hide all tiles that do not work. Eric: everyone help out on sprints, donate time, get a customer to build this for.