Eric Steele: The State of Plone

Plone had its 14th birthday last week. Lovingly cared for, with the weight of experience behind it.

First of all, thank you. A lot of work and love has been put into Plone 5. We have built something truly special.

Plone 5 has an all new design. A toolbar on the left for editors, with basically everything you used to be able to do from the edit bar. It lives outside of the theme, so no more problems with a theme that would mess up your edit experience.

Folder contents, with for example bulk adding of tags or changing the state. Upload multiple files.

New TinyMCE, much better than what we had previously. Works responsively, so also on other devices.

We redesigned the control panel. Add-ons page has a complete revamp, much nicer and easier to understand. Social media settings.

Theming has been changed. A Diazo theme as base. You can copy the base theme in the UI and edit it right there. A really powerful tool, it makes the initial theming experience much nicer.

Our default content story is Dexterity now. You can still use Archetypes if you want, for now.

We have finally got recurring events rights, like adding an event that recurs each Sunday until the end of the year.

Plone 5 is accessible, meeting lots of accessibility requirements. You will hear more about that in the keynote tomorrow. New multilingual framework, in the core, working for both Dexterity and Archetypes. So: all the content, all the time, for all the people.

There is lots of room for extending Plone and integrating it into all kinds of other systems.

We have sturdy security, especially with automatic CSRF protection.

Evolution of hackability. In earlier Plones you could work through the web, but this was not considered best practice, because you could not really manage your code nicely. Eric Brehault said: we should build an unhackable core, but add something hackable on top of it. Empower people in all the right places. Customization is a feature. We can use through the web prototyping to rapidly come up with a solution that you can then export.

Annette Lewis is a designer of website on Penn State University. New Plone user. She runs about 40 sites. Base theme and policy products, and the rest is done entirely through the web, with dexterity, diazo, theme editor. "It feels like you can do a lot from the front without touching the web." She now has a two week release cycle for sites.

Mosaic is the successor to the oft-repeated Deco project. Not in core. It allows you to stick content on a page, move it around however you want. Look for plone.app.mosaic. Asko Soukka has been working on this two years straight. In beta. We are close to having it for real. Dexterity plus Diazo plus Mosaic is really powerful.