In February of 2008, 50 members of the Plone community met at the GooglePlex in Mountain View to discuss the state of Plone and how we as a community could work together. It was a powerful event for me as I had been feeling like those of us who have been faithful to Plone for nearly a decade were being told to deal with all the painful changes to Plone (just deal with it man, what’s your problem, buildout just works). Like a teenager who gets a tattoo or body piercing and doesn’t tell his parents Plone just showed up one day with a great big tattoo and those of us who had been feeding and nurturing this baby for years felt, well, betrayed and confused.
Granted, Plone has to spread his wings and leave the nest at some point, it’s inevitable and necessary.
It has to mature, it has to become an independent being and make it’s indelible mark in this world. But did it have to hurt those who love him most to do it? PSPS provided those of us who felt like the rug had been pulled out from under us the opportunity to say, “Look I realize these changes are necessary what can we do to mend the rift and improve the overall story for integrators and end users.”
We use what you build, why make it hard for us to use it? (it’s as simple as that)
Plone listened. Plone took note. Plone is taking action.
Three months after the summit there is heavy work on many of the Action Items that were “championed” at the summit. There are also other “tools” coming out of the event. Example, gloWorm (though in alpha) by the WebLion promises to be an olive branch to those of us still trying to figure out viewlets. gloWorm will allow wysiwyg viewlet management for the “code” challenged among us. As someone who has just ventured into Plone 3 theming the levels one must go through to customize certain sections of a Plone site can be daunting and frustrating. Where is this coming from? ugh
Thank You Eric Steele (WebLion) for taking our concerns and doing something about it!
(I’m editing this because I forgot another tool that WebLion- Rob Porter has created and that is CSSManager - this opens as a youtube video with a quick overview of what CSS Manager is)
Buildout builders are in progress. This will allow non-programmers to pick and choose what we want installed when we create a new Plone site (my understanding anyway, correct me if I’m wrong).
Deliverance, our foray into WSGI and looking like it’ll improve the overall theming story.
There is more and more work on internationalization. Weisglass Ofer is making inroads into translation of all core elements of Plone into the RTL languages. We are at 100% translation in Arabic! We are also working on UI in the RTL languages (I’ll be making a separate announcement for a virtual sprint at the end of June for RTL UI bug fixing)
It has only been a few months since we met for the summit and yet so much has transpired. My relationship with Plone (although slightly bruised when 3.0 came out) is getting stronger and stronger.
Thank you so much for all your excellent work and please keep us integrators in the loop!
