Plone

published Nov 03, 2021

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Guest blog Fred: Armin Stross-Radschinski: The future of content?

published Oct 16, 2015

Guest blog by Fred van Dijk. Talk by Armin Stross-Radschinski at the Plone Conference 2015 in Bucharest.

What is the next disruptive thing coming our way? Difficult to say: streaming video: yes. Apple Newton: wrong timing.

Interactive content could be the next thing. Viewers control the content and choose what to do (next).

Media assets, what do we have now? Text, images, audio, video.

The browser is a stage. Sliders, accordeons, carrousels. Timing matters, video is linear, only one thing to control.

Another example of new interactive content: the scrolling one-pager, where you scroll down a page and there's a parallax effect, scrolling animations, movies. etc. Java and flash enabled these kinds of things earlier but didn't catch on that much. HTML5 and javascript are stronger enablers.

Why is interactive content interesting for business? Offer all the overload of content in different representations. Multichannel publication is another thing: re-use content in different ways. Tell different stories, tell the same story in a different way.

Warning: keep your assets under control, the cloud is a dangerous place for your media. Have a media archive internally. Control metadata. EXIF can be corrupted by external (cloud services). Also usage and license tracking is difficult if not impossible with many cloud hosting services. The best future is now: the browser has become very powerful.

Digital signage: public screen, led walls, info screens. But you need a CMS as a backend to provide the data. Display devices have become powerful: PDF display, 3D, panoramic images. Audio/Video. And you can do this on mobile phones, tablets, pc sticks you just insert in the back of your TV.

Something else that's coming: gamification. Interactive solutions, touch is getting common to interact with content. Don't overdo control though, sometimes people want to relax and sit back to enjoy the content.

Panoramic views are quite old already: viewmaster toys, 3D stereo images with special goggles and the stereoscope. New VR technologies allow to give viewers an overview of an area or geography, but imaging showing an overview of content, documents, images on a virtual 3D wall in front of you. Or overlay reality with computer content.

Devices now: Google Glass, Oculus Rift. Expensive, but costs start to decrease. Google Cardboard. In 2016 the consumer version of Oculus Rift will be coming. VR viewers widen your horizon. A monitor only gives you a very small view angle. But a headset will scroll when you move your head, giving you the illusion of a huge view angle and it will become an immersive experience.

Navigation in 3D. New input devices: display control items as overlays in the virtual environment, when you look at control links you can jump to them. The CMSes will have to support these new controls and directives, with extra assets and application settings to control these 3D devices. 3D impresses: it's like being there, the context is always right and memorizing (the experience) is more intense.

Plone will need to adapt to make this future happen and support new approaches and integrate these technologies. There's more than the web. Plone already has a lot: secure base functionality, can deal with unstructured data, python to script a lot, workflow process control.

[Thanks to Fred van Dijk for this guest blog.]

Lightning talks Friday

published Oct 16, 2015

Lightning talks on Friday at the Plone Conference 2015 in Bucharest.

Jens Klein and Christine Baumgartner: Castle Sprint

A message from the prince. Castle in Goldegg, near Vienna. Next year Plone is fifteen years old. We will go back to our foundations. We will organize another Castle Sprint, with Phil Auersberg. We will announce more at the end of the year. Sprint will be around end Spetember, beginning October next year. Will be a small invent. We will be sure to invite Alex Limi and others.

Sven Strack: mr.docs

mr.docs tests documentation. Uses docker with properly configured Sphinx installed. With this in combination with mr.butler I have started testing the plone core packages. I will start sending mails to the last committer when you broke the package.

Joel Lambilotte: IMIO

Created by Belgian government. We write Plone software for local authorities. An organization was needed so we can share software: local authorities usually do not do this, as they are competing with each other. IMIO has more than 240 members, more than 60 percent of the Walloon communities.

Chris Lozinski

Zope ZMI sprint starting today. Demonstration of the J templating language.

Christine Baumgartner: Alpine City Sprint

At the end of January, welcome in the Alps!

Gil Forcada: World Plone Office Day

Each last Friday of the month: work on Plone. We have entry-level tasks ready so newcomers can join. Talk about it on social media, get on irc. You can meet with each other, maybe join forces with a few companies that day. Thanks!

Philip Bauer: migration of custom types

Plone is awesome. Say you have a custom archetypes content type. Install plone.app.contenttypes. Your custom type is still editable. On the new content types you can enable all kinds of behavior, so you want this for your content type too. You go to the @@custom_migration view, select your old content type, a new content type, some fields to migrate, and Plone will migrate your content items.

There is no need to write custom migrations yourself, just use this, and report issues if you encounter them, and we will help you.

Simone Orsi, Matt Hamilton: Plone Open Garden

PLOG is the best way to get in touch with the Plone community. We organize it every year in the Italian spring. Speakers, a garden to talk about Plone, sprinting. What is Plone for you? Find out in Sorrento! Family oriented event, you can bring wife, husband, kids.

Eric Brehault: Empowering users

We have a powerful theming tool, excellent, good. But users need more. They need to be able to create dynamic blocks, insert those into the page. They can do html, Python, but don't know viewlets, portlets, tiles, thingies. Now they can use Rapido. Rapido extends the theming editor. Create a folder, add html, simple python, use Diazo or Mosaic to include it, and it is going to work. You can use plone.api in your python code. It has a ready-to-use json backend, with full REST api. You can add content rules with hooks for it.

Jonas Baumann: ftw FTW

At 4teamwork we have made some handy tools for testing.

With ftw.builder you can easily create content and users in tests.

ftw.testbrowser allows to use lxml and css selectors in your tests. Also use browser.debug() to open the page in a real browser.

See https://github.com/jone/ploneconf2015.testingdemo

Victor Fernandez de Alba: new plone.org

Showing the current state of the new plone.org that is under construction. We will still integrate several stats, like github commits. Contributor profiles. We will work more on this during the sprint.

Maik Derstappen: CMS Garden

CMS Garden is a foundation, a joint venture of open source CMSes. We did quite a lot of events. Bigger than Microsoft and Telekom at the German LinuxTag for example. Starting 30 October this year we will have our first 'unconference' in Essen, Germany. Welcome to our garden!

We have produced a brochure with information on open source CMSes. If you are interested in organizing something in your own country, contact us.

QA Team open space

published Oct 16, 2015

QA Team open space at the Plone Conference 2015 in Bucharest.

Manual QA: install prereleases when Eric Steele announces them? Partially. Also: make sure people other than consultants can use it, so having updated documentation, if only a note that most add-ons have not been updated yet.

We had a Launch Team, with representative of other teams. Can we turn that into a QA team? Meeting say once a month, coordinating, checking if existing teams can handle things.

Isn't it then a Process Team? Another layer. Multiadapter.

Sounds a bit like a daily executive team.

No, the release team may say we are ready for a release. But then we need to check with other teams. The technical side has a process, but the non-technical side not really. With Plone 5 a lot of technical stuff has happening and the non-technical side was rushing along trying to catch up.

The hotfix was there, the community was informed. But then there were updates to the hotfix and the communications team was not informed.

For releasing, we may start doing real alpha, beta, release candidate releases, and then do an actual final release with only a version number change. That may also give you time to update other parts, like communication and docs. And you can tell the release team to hold off. For docs, we need to include the latest stuff, even if it is automatically, but we need a moment to check it.

Problem is when technical is moving along fast and other teams cannot catch up. Technical is used to just pushing on regardless.

Have email addresses for teams.

Changelogs: declare if something is a bug fix or feature or something else. Check this automatically if possible, see if it is declared. Have best practices. Have a CONTRIBUTING.rst file in each repo: this automatically ends up on github when creating an issue or pull request.

Make it visible if all teams are ready, whether manual or automatic.

For major releases, you can prepare better, because there should be plips.

What checklists do we need?

Communications team:

  • Input: changelog, the interesting 'cherries'. Saying how to get to the new features (go here, check this box). For changes: is it a feature, a bug fix, is it for developers or end-users.
  • Output: news item, newsletter, social media, progress report, update feature list on plone.com. What's in it for end-users, developers, that decides what output we need. How are the changes significant.

Annual meeting of Plone Foundation

published Oct 15, 2015

Annual meeting of the Plone Foundation at the Plone Conference 2015 in Bucharest.

Everyone is welcome, only members of the Plone Foundation can vote.

There is a report of the last year. Together with other documentation, see https://plone.org/foundation/meetings/membership/2015-membership-meeting

Thank you to the membership committee, ambassadors, Google Summer of Code, including talk of student Prakhar Joshi today.

Some activities this year: Plone Symposium Tokyo, Strategic Summit Sorrento. Sprints funded: FourDigits Anniversary Sprint, Munich Theming Sprint. There were lots more sprints.

Launch of http://plone.com. Many thanks to many people!

We were present in PyCon, EuroPython. Hardly any marketing money applied there, more guerilla marketing, with lots of T-shirts at the right time.

Plone 5 launch, which we had nothing to do with, except that we launched a Launch Team for issues that are not code related. Much better than the Plone 4 release which was basically dumping a tarball on the website. Thanks!

CMS Garden Brochure with a section on Plone, working together with other open source CMSes. We are not each others enemies, we have other fish to fry. Thanks Maik, Armin, Christina.

Relicensing of Mockup to BSD.

Trademarks renewed or reissued, for another ten years.

New foundation members: Kees Hink, Sally Kleinfeldt, Guido Stevens, Alin Voinea, Christina McNeill, Peter Holzer, K K Dhanesh, Fred van Dijk, Roel Bruggink, William Fennie, Cris Ewing. You are very welcome to nominate yourself for membership, don't be shy, no impostor syndrome please. :-)

Nathan van Gheem is representative on TinyMCE user advisory board. OSI membership. Social media support by Christina.

Thank you to all our sponsors. New: university sponsors. The first is the University of Namur, Belgium.

Financial balance: we are more or less even.

Philip Bauer moves to approve the report. Cris Ewing seconds. Everyone says aye. Report is approved.

Now a new Foundation board of directors.

Cris and Steve are leaving the board. Nominees for the next board. Existing: Kim, Alexander, Paul, Carol, Chrissy. New: Philip, Victor.

Christina moves to approve the new board. Alexander seconds. All say aye. We have a new board.

Any pressing concerns that you want to ask?

Alexander moves to adjourn the meeting, Philip seconds. All say aye.

Lightning talks Thursday

published Oct 15, 2015

Lightning talks on Thursday at the Plone Conference 2015 in Bucharest.

[I missed the first lightning talks.]

Fred van Dijk: Non technical talk

Our marketing posters are now not only lists of features, but they get a feeling across, like: Plone cares about you. Thank you, marketing team and whoever worked on this.

Imposter syndrome: other people know much much more than I do, so I will keep my mouth shut and not do a lightning talk.

Well... sometimes you actually are incompetent. Don't go from incompetent to overconfident.

Read this book by Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, fast and slow. Don't read too much at the same time. Biggest take-away: two systems to create thoughts. Subconscious or active, which both are very valuable at their time.

Dylan Jay: hostout.docker

I presented hostout years ago, we still use it. Sets up python, server, custom packages. You can have one big mega buildout and deploy parts to different servers.

We have now added Docker support. Run:

bin/hostout app01 docker

JC Brand: converse.js

In Arnhem I gave a talk on xmpp integration in Plone. Afterwards I took a part of that and created converse.js. The xmpp server delegates authentication to the Plone Site, using this javascript. So you can authenticate as username@plonesite.domain.

Chris Ewing: collective.isotope

On our Jazkarta site, we have a projects folder. We want visitors to be able to filter through this list. We use the isotope library for this. [Looks nice!]

Config panel where you can arrange filters, sorting, layout.

https://github.com/collective/collective.isotope

I would love to have this as a javascript pattern instead, I would happily use that.

Antonio: cloud deployment

Cloud deployment of a Plone 5 cluster on multiple hosts. Plone 5 docker images eeacms/plone and eeacms/zeo. Rancher on top for the multiple hosts.