Eric Steele: The State of Plone

I start with some community updates from the past year.

• We have six new foundation members: Christine, Thomas, Fulvio, Rikupekka, Kim, Stefania.
• We have added Zope to the Plone Foundation.
• 35 new core Plone committers.
• Nine funded sprints.
• There was a sprint in Barcelona this year from the Automization and Infrastructure team. They worked dist.plone.org and other core servers, rewriting Ansible scripts. They are looking to do two or three sprints next year, and they would like more people to join. You don't need to be an expert.
• Google Summer of Code: Gatsby and Guillotina work was done.
• Google Season of Docs: improved Volto documentation.
• A lot more people have been following Plone trainings. The trainings are available for free via https://training.plone.org. Right now 17 different courses available.
• Steve McMahon is stepping down from creating Plone installers. Please step up, and he will gladly help along in a transition period.

Python 3:

• Python 2.7 will not get security patches anymore from 1 January 2020. So for Plone it was really important to run on Python 3. That now works: first Zope was upgraded, and now Plone 5.2 runs on Python 2 and 3.
• Archetypes is now optional. It will not work at all in Python 3, so this is your wake-up call to update your code to use Dexterity.

Other changes in Plone 5.2:

• Plone 5.2 gives us plone.restapi. This means BYOFE: Bring Your Own Front End. So if you want, you can create an own front end to talk to Plone as backend.
• We have dropdown navigation.
• The login code was rewritten, to not use the old skin layers anymore, but use browser views. Much better testable.
• Theme improvements: static resource refactoring, removed old css/js resource registries, first main content then sidebar content.
• Integrated Products.RedirectionTool so you can manage redirects.

Other:

• Guillotina was started as a reimagining of Plone. It is really a separate project now. New version 5 has PostgreSQL indexing and search, pub/sub, there is Guillotina CMS.
• The new Pastanaga UI is evolving. We have a design document for Plone now.
• Volto: React-based front end that uses plone.restapi to talk to Plone. It uses the Pastanaga UI. Dramatically simplified rich text editor. It uses modern front end development, instead of building our own tools. We are improving the learning curve by removing Plone from the learning curve. That is awkward to say for me, but it brings more people in, front enders who can customize Volto. Volto uses JSX (JavaScript Expressions), Semantic UI. Significantly faster than our current built-in front end. And Volto works on both Plone and Guillotina. It is almost on par with the existing Plone UI, but some features are missing, like content rules and several control panels.

Volto helps with decoupled development. Plone is about keeping your data safe, having migrations. That is all backend stuff. We need a measured pace for this. The front end needs to evolve much faster, which Volto can do.

Challenges and open questions.

• Can we move to one content type, that can behave like an event, or a page or a folder? Does that solve problems or introduce new ones? Timo will talk about that.
• UI support: how much of the classic Plone UI do we keep around? Do we put all effort into Volto instead?
• What is "Plone" now? We have said: Plone is a CMS, a framework, a product, a community.
• We can say: Plone is the API contract: You can use Plone on top of Zope, or you can use Guillotina, you have an API on top of that, plus a front end. But what is important is this contract: security, flexibility, extensibility, user experience.