Plone Newsroom Live

Welcome from Fred van Dijk and Philip Bauer. This is episode 11 of the Plone Newsroom podcast.

Plone 6 beta 3 was released last week. Your password needs to be longer. Tables like nicer now. There were four Volto alpha releases meanwhile. We need more documentation and marketing.

Community member news: Ramon got married. Peter Holzer has left Plone, working for a new employer. We appreciate everything he has done, and what others have done who have left. People come and go, and some come back: David Glick.

What were some highlights of the past season? Having Victor on the show. The composite pages episode. The growing up of Plone Classic and Volto side by side.

How about the presentations this week so far? Fred's talk obviously, about how some managers and organisations handle Plone. Volto talks: we can see it is working. Plone beyond 2022, with technical planning on the frontend. Keynote about minerals. Diversity talk: we can fix stuff, improve stuff.

Trainings: Happy that we have the Effective Volto training now, to have the brains of Tiberiu and Victor not only in their heads, but also on a site for us to read. Classic UI Theming: good to see how fast it is to start a new theme with plonecli. Patternslib is great, and it was there before React.

Conference advice:

• The talks here are live recorded and almost live uploaded to YouTube, which is great. Skip a beer tonight and watch an extra video.
• When talking with people, be an open circle, so others can join.

For next year's conference organisers, here is some advice from Martijn: 

• Do it.
• Push for early bird tickets earlier. You want to know earlier how many people are coming.

The software is an artefact of the Plone community. Johannes, you organised a sprint? Yes, the Buschenschanksprint in Austria. Buschenschanks are in the Südsteiermark area of Austria close to Slovenia. Lots of vineyards there. Organising is not that hard. Have a place for people to work, maybe a place to stay at night as well, organise some food and drinks and internet. Then announce it. The Plone Foundation has funding for this. The sprints are important, are social, and so much work is done, it is awesome!

Rikupekka, please come on stage. He has been working on marketing and especially the new plone.org. We are done for eight months already, so it will be done soon. There are designs, there is code, there is migration, there is progress. This weekend you can sprint on the site. First we need a running site with Volto with the design that the Italians made. Write good content for plone.org, come to me with that.

When you support a website, be it Plone or Wordpress, and a feature request comes in, you can duck. Deny the request. Or accept them all and it will grow into an unmaintainable monster. With both these approaches, every other system starts looking appealing. I call this product fatigue. We see talks here with universities with thousands of Plone sites, and other universities step away from Plone, why?

Plugins:

• pas.plugins.oidc for authenticating with openid connect
• pas.plugins.authomatic got a Volto port

More about Volto. We both agree that Volto is by rights the default frontend of Plone 6. Will this be the only frontend in five to ten years? A few hands go up in the audience. The difference is: do you have an html canvas with some javascript, or a javascript canvas with some html? Requirements that I see coming in, are better met by Volto. Based on the reaction, you would say that no one here needs to fear the the Classic UI will die out in the next five to ten years. The path to the more dynamic frontend is there, but we are not pushing you.

See you next time!