Lightning talks Wednesday

published Oct 27, 2021

Lightning talks on Wednesday at the online Plone Conference 2021.

Peter Holzer: My first Plone 6 site

This was in April 2020. I friend wanted a shop for his post cards. Lots of search filters.

We create a new Plone theme on Bootstrap 5. Updated our bda.shop stack.

See https://www.fotoeigenart.ch

Michael McFadden: Web developer confessions

I had a web form up where people could submit confessions, totally anonymous.

  • I used Perl
  • I sometimes test things in production.
  • I voted against removing the tag from HTML.
  • I store user passwords, as we often need to login as a user to fix their... stuff. We take precautions, but still.
  • I allowed editors to add css at a top level in the site.
  • I have a marquee tag on our site.
  • I am using iframes to include those who are unwilling to move into our big Plone Site. It is a way to do imports.
  • I use pdb on production all the time with a client instance.
  • I use
    for my page layout.
  • I don't setup the whole translation machinery on our Plone Site. Hello USA!
  • I use heavily duplicated code. What's wrong with coding with copy and paste.
  • I did not backup my data, and I knew the RAID aray was bad.
  • I think downtime is good for mental health.
  • I still hate javascript. And now we have node.
  • I don't always do web development. But when I do, I do it through Zope using plone_custom.css on a production site.
  • I fixed it with css. .class {display: none !important}
  • I suggested to a user to try it in another browser, like Edge. I am still ashamed.
  • I am not trained in UX or web design, but I do it anyway, because I just know what's right.

Fulvio Casali: Plone sponsorships

We are looking for financial sponsorship on a regular basis. Open source is a labor of love, but we also need money. The Plone Foundation supports the community financially for sprints, conferences, releases. We have administrative costs, like for trademarks, lawyers, hosting.

So you support independent media producers via Patreon, Substack, Medium, Youtube? How much? If not, maybe your boss does? Have you watched listened to the Plone podcasts?

Sponsors can be providers, customers, universities, companies that somehow use Plone. We couldn't do it without you.

Mail sponsor@plone.org.

Dylan Jay: Why Drupal won down under

Two stories of government websites, in this case UK and Australia, where other CMSes won the day. Maybe with Plone 6 we can gain some ground back.

PreviousNext is a Drupal shop in Australia. In 2012 aGov launched, a distribution of Drupal specifically for Australian Government websites. That was cleverly done. They organized a Drupal conf in Canberra, the capitol. Most of the stuff could not have been done without support by Acquia, the behemoth company behind Drupal. It helps to be able to say that they have got you backed.

Then the UK. In 2012 Gov.uk launched. 2013 Service manual published.

Ideas for Plone:

  • Open CMS for a specific government.
  • Acquia equivalent
  • How to sell o governments that have been burnt by Plone?
  • Target internal React developers.
  • Use a better term than 'enterprise'. Governance CMS for React Developers?
  • Concentrate on services, not websites?

Maik Derstappen: Current state of Mockup

We are moving Mockup and Patternslib to ES6. We replaced some Mockup patterns with patterns from Patternslib. Most mockup patterns are finished, just a few left that need a bit of work. Plone Classic UI frontend works basically, some issues left in control panels mostly.

Things will get easier. No more RequireJS yelling at you. Add-ons can provide, require and ship any javascript module. Plone will only load everything once, thanks to Webpack module federation.

Timeline: ES6 branch will be merged in the coming months.

Give it a try using the buildout.coredev repository and:

./bin/buildout -c plips/plip-3211-mockup-redone.cfg

Help us! Join us during the conference sprint or every Thursday on Discord, the classic-ui voice channel.

Johannes Raggam: Javascript integration

This is about Webpack module federation.

Goals:

  • add-on without recompiling
  • No or negligable code duplication, small bundle size

Hard to achieve with Plone 5 and RequireJS.

New concept: Webpack module federation, or actually just module federation, as it is not tied to webpack.

  • separate bundles
  • dependencies between each other
  • define shared bundles
  • define exported and remote modules
  • fallback to own dependency

David Glick: Snowfakery

Snowfakery is a tool for generating fake data that has relations between tables. Every row is faked data, but also unique and random, like a snowflake. To tell Snowfakery what data you want to generate, you need to write a Recipe file in YAML.

You may want realistic data in tests, but not production data.

I write a yaml file and tell it how many folders and documents to create. I let snowfakery export this to json. Actually, I have defined a slightly different format for Plone. This outputs a json file that can be used by collective.exportimport.

Snowfakery documentation: https://snowfakery.readthedocs.io/en/docs/

Philip Bauer: One small VS Code trick

For the training this year for the first time I used one editor for both Volto and Classic. This is because of one VS Code trick.

I use the Pylance language server for VS Code, which is fine, but it cannot initially find the Plone code. Simple fix for that: I have a script zopepy in my bin folder. Find it, copy the path, in VS code configuration go to 'Python: Select interpreter', and paste the path. After a few seconds, or maybe reloading an open file, it works, and VS Code finds all packages and modules.

Erico - New Docker images

Plone loves containers. Some have had a love/hate relationship with Docker, but we are over it. Maybe Docker is over it too.

We have a new generation of Plone Docker images:

- ``plone/plone-backend`` 5.2.6 and 6.0.0a1
- ``plone/plone-frontend`` Volto 14.0.0-alpha
- ``plone/plone-zeo`` is still available (5.2)
- ``plone/plone-haproxy``

Use your own Plone image, with an example extra add-on:

FROM plone/plone-backend:6.0.0a1
RUN ./bin/pip install "pas.plugins.authomatic --use-deprecated legacy-resolver"

The use-deprecated option should hopefully not be needed in the near future. Maurits has opened a [PR in pip](https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/10574) for that.

All these images are based on pip. One point: do not use autoIncludeDependencies in your zcml, as this does not work with pip.

Examples for Docker compose: https://github.com/plone/plone-frontend#using-docker-compose

Thank you to the installers team: Jens, Alin, Silvio, Steve, Kim, Erico.

Keywords
plone ploneconf2021