Alex Ghica: Bucharest conference

The next big Plone conference will be in October this year, in Bucharest, capital of Romania. Five star hotel in the city center. High tower. By flight it is connected to lots of cities. Currently still cheap, about 40 euros from Amsterdam for a return flight. Sponsors are welcome. In about a month the conference tickets will be available, early bird about 360 euro.

See http://2015.ploneconf.org

Gil Forcada: WPOD

WPOD is: World Plone Office Day. Last Friday of the month, do not work on customer projects, but work on Plone. We should have entry-level tasks ready. Talk about it, so that people know this is happening. In each city, meet at a company's office, have a good, productive, enjoyable time with each other. Be available as mentor, team leader. Open a sprint channel on irc.

First one: April 24th.

Philip: I pledge that my company will do this every month, at least half a day, maybe a day. I challenge other companies to do the same. And be welcoming and helpful for newbies.

Guido Stevens: Plone Intranet

We have a Plone Intranet Consortium. Would that approach be doable for Plone core? It takes a long preparation, the first steps were started six years ago. It takes willingness to invest time and money. It is a business opportunity, asking investment and needing payment after a while by happy clients.

Demo of Mercury development version of Plone Intranet. Activity stream. Important sticky notes that remain visible until you click them. @mention people. Uploading for example a word document will convert it to PDF. Work spaces. Raptor as rich text editor. Wrapper around the sharing tab: three sliders to set your work space policy. Using experimental.securityindexing for permission indexing speedup. We want to do the Venus release before the summer. Workflow state transitions as milestones, use it for case management, fully flexible. Faceted SOLR search. Image bank. Render previews in the search. Personal page with personal stream. Find people by expertise. Follow people.

So that is the product. What is interesting is the process. Nine companies participate currently. Thousand euro per month, one developer day per week. Working from six or seven countries, sprinting remotely. Difficult to get traction, or on-boarding new developers. You need a few months to become productive. If you want to sell these solutions, the investment pays back. It is not just an add-on that you add to your Plone Site with a couple of others. First approach is to install it, change logo and other theming, do LDAP integration, upgrade, support it, make money that way. Second approach is to do your own design, and really think that through for a specific client. You can develop apps for it too.

Running on Plone 5 alpha 3. Dexterity content types. No z3c.form. Patternslib with the inject pattern. We keep accessibility in mind, it also works without Javascript. (Remember that accessibility is not the same as no Javascript. But some countries, at least the Netherlands, require non-javascript for certain sites.) Storing objects in btrees for performance. Lots of development goes into front-end code. Mobile-first design: working nicely on phones and tablets.

We develop it in a consortium, but the code is GPL and is donated to the Plone Foundation. Participating as a business is a risk, a possibility, and a lot of fun and opportunity to learn. If you want to participate, then make your decision. It should be a sound business decision.

It is one repository on github, but composed of multiple Python packages.

See the documentation: http://docs.ploneintranet.org

Ramon, Aleix: Machine learning for Plone content

http://iskra.cat/

Machine learning for text. Automatically learn from data, then predict for new content.

First step: from text to vectors. Second step: from vector to model.

Clustering: we automatically cluster documents together, so you get a list of related items, without needing to select them manually. It will allow us to create an automatic sitemap based on the clusters or topics.

Classification: text and tags. Predicting which tags would be appropriate for a newly added document.

We would love to have a Plone Machine Learning API.

• getLearningText(content)
• getLearningTags(content)
• getLearningRelation(content)

Computing the models: using scikit-learn. If you recompute at each new document, it will be slow.

Multi resolution time series, for continuously changing data, like number of visitors. Numbers instead of text. Lossy storage: less data, only the interesting info. Related work: RRDtool.

Ideas: generate taxonomy of tags.

Kim Nguyen presents results from the Strategic Summit Survey

35 results back. Mostly: developer, solution provider, site-admin, deployer. Mostly North America and Europe, a couple from Asia, Africa, South America, Caribbean or world wide. Most have ten or more years of experience with Plone. Majority is not a Plone Foundation member. Some of you should be.

Now to some answers by those people.

What should be on the technical agenda? Nothing: this should be an open discussion of the future of the product. API. Plone 5 release. Moving away from Zope 2 and CMF. Making Plone more customizable through the web, easier to get started. Block editing, mosaic, tiles. Improving learning curve for developers, making it easier to come on board. Plone Intranet, Patternslib, Mockup, Python 3 (one), Continuous Integration. Refocus Plone as secure workflow tool, not necessarily a CMS. Replace catalog with SOLR. Better custom themes. Sidebar UI, some of the choices around this. Better mobile theming out of the box, use for mobile applications.

What should be on the non technical agenda? Marketing, visibility, promotions, formalise it, maybe professionalise? New plone.com and plone.org, get your success stories or your provider on it. Better communication from sprints, team leaders to the community and to marketing or external audiences. Get more money for the Plone Foundation. Who is the target user, client, customer? Concerns about upgrade from Plone 4. Be more welcoming to developers and other contributors. Monthly global sprints, similar to the earlier Plone TuneUps, re-energize the community. Releasing Plone 5. Better sustained documentation and consolidation, more help needed there. Consolidated bug tracking, merging into one place. Better Plone training, getting new people up to speed. Improve collaboration with Python, Pyramid, Django, Javascript communities. Decision process for PLIPs and their inclusion.

What should be the outcome of the summit? Roadmap, structured plan. Vision, better marketing. Plone 5 ship date (six months?). New community energy and synergy.

Paul Roeland and Eric Steele: summarizing complaints

• TinyMCE showing its age.
• People being spoiled by Google Docs.
• Where to do content editing.
• Scheduling content, how that works, expiring.
• Old and new style collections do different things. Difficult programmatically.
• Documentation: dexterity without Grok is not documented well, if at all.
• Sorting portlets. There is an add-on though.
• Deploying to different sites. Some add-on as well, so: notifying people what add-ons are available.
• ZCatalog takes ages, indexing, reindexing, unindexing.
• Adapters are hard to grasp as concept for new developers.
• Changing a label in a dexterity behavior for just one content type is not possible.
• Difficult to find Plone devs to hire, to train up new devs.
• Nobody wants to touch Zope and CMF parts.
• Collective add-ons, hard to get overview.
• How to get extra content on the page. Several ways.
• Plone complexity makes estimating a project complex.
• Editing complex pages. Deco, cover, mosaic.
• Concerns about migration process to Plone 5.
• Challenging to keep up with what is happening in community.
• Where are we at and where are we going.
• Clients like concrete release dates.
• What to do with the underlying stuff. More boring, but somebody needs to do that, clean it up.
• Not good as community at making decisions, which means nothing gets thrown away.
• Look at it from a business standpoint: how much would it cost to support Archetypes, how much to drop it, etcetera. Cost of current inefficiency is high, you can be bug hunting for hours. Cost of throwing lots of stuff away, is also high. Starting from scratch is very costly as well.
• Feature changes ending up in bug fix releases.
• LDAP integration is bad.
• Not updating outdated documentation.

Eric Steele: Plone 5

There is a buildout for the first beta. Mockup has had issues with frequent rewrites. Control panels have now been modernized, using z3c.form and the configuration registry. plone.app.contenttypes is in there. Migrations for standard content types is working, for custom content types it is there but needs more love and/or money; you still have to write your own content types, views, templates of course. Dexterity is default content type story. New Barceloneta theme. Improved folder contents tab.

We have completely rewriting the way we use Javascript in Plone. Using more modern techniques, like RequireJS. A new Resource Registries panel in the Plone UI to edit this. You can edit less variables through the web, kind of like the old base_properties. We are now able to use more modern widgets, without needing to maintain outdated ones ourselves.

When will it be out? The more you test it and report bugs, the earlier we can ship it.

Eric and Paul: Community and communication

We have semi-regular team leader meetings. We are putting notes up on http://community.plone.org. There are lots of duties to take on, certainly also for non-core developers. You are very welcome.

Documentation is in reorganisation. Restructuring documentation that was already there. The documentation team is not the one to write a doc about say creating a dexterity content type without Grok. Someone else will need to write it, and we can then help getting it more understandable, in better English, etcetera. You do not need to be good at writing, you just need to write.

A lot of the teams are currently one person. We need to do a better job of getting more people in. Some people are in multiple teams, overcommitted, like Timo and Ramon.

Víctor Fernández de Alba is working on new plone.org, mostly on his own. Migrating some of the content using transmogrifier. Using Plone 4, with plone.app.contenttypes. Documents, events, news, images, files are migrated, PloneSoftwareCenter will not be used anymore, so that content will not be migrated. We wanted to have the PLIP process on plone.org, so we no longer need dev.plone.org. Maybe profile page for Plone contributors, listing which teams they belong to, other information. Maybe we want to rework the theme, change the landing page. Should be discussed, maybe during these days. Package is plone.org.core. You can see on github what is left and what is done.

Paul: dev.plone.org is now spam-free again, mainly thanks to Chrissy Wainwright. Down to about 600 tickets to export and import to github. There is a way of moving tickets from one github repo to another, and a way of creating a ticket in an initial spot when you do not know where it should be reported. Needs a champion, someone to do it and/or slave drive others into doing it. Are you good at scripting, with at least minimal people skills, please step forward. Even better: a group of people.

Eric: https://community.plone.org is being used. We need to make the decision to flip the switch to make this the main forum. Yes, we will switch it this Friday. Not the developer list though.

Paul: http://paragon.plone.org is a site for searching the very best Plone add-ons. There is a jury. Work still needs to be done. Also: get your setup.py classifiers correct so they mention Plone and the Plone version, and they will show up in a list here as well.

Kim Nguyen: http://plone.com is live, soft-released. We used an issue tracker and systematically used it, filed and assigned tickets. We had weekly meetings to keep on track and to keep us honest. It is so important, it re-energizes people. Please step up in a project, help a little bit. [Christian Theune: Too many people working on their own: create a bigger team again, so people do not get stuck in their own little corner. It helped us a lot.] We want more success stories. We want to hear from you if you think the message needs more refinement. To get your provider up on plone.org, contact us and become a sponsor. It is a small amount, we want it to be affordable also if you are in an area of the world where you do not make a lot of money. The goal is not to get a lot of money from this, just to get an up to date list. Translations: we will discuss it on Thursday. If you want to be a part of plone.com as your country, contact us. Also fine to have your own site, like the Dutch http://plone.nl

Paul: documentation is there, but it is mostly for Plone 4. Plone 5 is getting closer, so this needs updating. Looking into getting robot tests for screen shots. That is actually easy to add in your code when you have something that is worthy of a screen shot. We will be contacting you about that,

Christina McNeill: one-person communication team. Plone Newsletter has been there for a year. About 160 subscribers. 80 percent is actually reading it, which is really high according to mailchimp. Marketing is not really my area of expertise, so we can use someone there. [Philip: please add a nicely visible button on the plone.org homepage to subscribe.]

Philip Bauer: David Glick and Tres Seaver have recently been working on getting Zope parts to run on Python 3. Is there a master plan? Eric: no.

Asko Soukka: Mosaic. We are working on it. It may be doing too much. May be hard for people to decide whether to use something in Mosaic versus Diazo. Lots of things in tiles are broken for lots of reasons, needing work. Many concepts. Store site-layouts as content types. Needs specific versions of plone.app.widgets and plone.app.events. There is a PLIP configuration to run it on Plone 5 in the core development buildout. Ramon: it works fine, but I am not trying to finish it for production. Philip: Mosaic should be a priority for us, let's not wait until our javascript story is completely finished. Crowd: do not try to do this on Plone 4 anymore, only on Plone 5. Asko: hide all tiles that do not work. Eric: everyone help out on sprints, donate time, get a customer to build this for.

Complaining session

What are your major pain points in working with Plone at the moment? We split into three groups.

• Almost impossible to hire new developers. Even just people who I can train up. Django or other Python web developers. There are no Plone developers walking around that you can snatch up. But you can train the others. Better have web developers than people who have only worked with Python in a scientific way. Still, there is lots of Plone code, divided over hundreds of packages, and that makes it hard for new people to get productive quickly.
• Lots of old CMF or Zope code from the nineties, or early this century, that mostly works, but that nobody dares to touch and improve or cleanup.
• Collective is nice, but there are thousands of packages, and no known good set of add-ons that really work and are still maintained. You do not want to reinvent the wheel, but do not want to use somebody else's abandoned wheel either.
• You can easily click around in the settings, but then you want to export it, create an upgrade step, just too much trouble to get that done right, at least for new developers. Or how do you get extra content on the page: viewlet? portlet? diazo? browser view? Through The Web is still a good starting point for getting new people enthousiastic. Sean Kelly's video is still awesome, drawing people in, but it uses technology that is eight years old and that we no longer advise.
• We miss completing things. Things start out nice, but developers get bored with it and it is much more fun to create new stuff without finishing the last five or ten percent. But to finish it, you need to put it in the wild and then people complain because it does not work completely. For example Dexterity, it had nice concepts, I tried using it a few years ago, in a way that should work (by looking at code, not at the then not existing documentation), and it did not work.
• Hard to estimate how much work it is to fix things in a new client project, so you estimate higher, so you do not get the project. It is not a problem specific to Plone. Problem of classical fixed price projects. Difficult for me to have profitable projects in Plone. Every project has a new black box, a new part of Plone that I have not touched before, so where I run into problems that are hard to estimate and solve.
• Plone has lots of features, it is hard to learn them all, keep them in your head. We might need to drop more stuff. It is easier and more fun to write something new.
• Editing of complex pages is hard, content on one page being shown on other pages. Too hard to build UI in Plone. We add a prefix for each component so we can know css for this component only affects that component instead of needing to know which other pages might be adversely affected too. Mosaic should be finished, it had been a problem for years to solve lots of theming problems we have.
• Some packages are old, for example last release of plone.app.tiles is from 2012, but there have been several helpful commits on it which have not been released.
• Plone is ahead in some areas, but in the user experience of content editing, Plone is lagging behind in enterprise level.
• I am concerned about migration from Plone 4 to 5. I generally customize login form, really specific theme now with Diazo. Now all the login form stuff was removed, done differently, so it is going to be hard to redo. I may not be able to sell this migration to the customer, and stay on Plone 4 for years. Currently we use bootstrap 3, and Plone 5 theme uses bootstrap 2, so that will give difficulties. Lots of add-ons cannot support both Plone 4 and 5. Upgrade guide still needs to be written. Also upgrade guide from Archetypes to Dexterity, and from LinguaPlone to plone.app.multilingual. It would already help to add a header in the documentation to remind others that something needs to be written.
• Several packages have been released as a bugfix release, where it suddenly no longer works in Plone 4, without creating a branch.
• If stuff is broken, open a ticket. But it should be clear where to file it, on the front page of docs.plone.org.
• Lots of pull requests are open, please look at them. If you are not sure about merging, at least add a comment. We need a process. dev.plone.org is slowly being moved to github.
• Current LDAP integration is old. Lots of layers. Very large or remote LDAP: very slow. Should be on the roadmap, in core Plone.
• Releases are not happening often enough, should be every month. Now releases take up too many changes, which can give more unexpected problems. There is just so much development going on that it is hard to keep on top as release manager. Working on a release team.
• Complaint about companies using Plone and not contributing back. But sometimes it is hard to contribute. Plone TuneUp may be reintroduced, with team leaders available. Get people into the community. Make donations easier.
• It used to be easy to create complex workflow with ArchGenXML, but now you need to code it yourself. There is a plone.app.workflowmanager that does similar things, rewrite going on.
• Setup a review service so you can pay someone to look at your project to check that it is state of the art.