Keynote: The state of Plone (Alexander Limi, Alan Runyan)

Things to be proud of, work to be done and the way ahead.

Alexander and Alan started their talk with quite a number of things they and the community can be proud of. Amongst others:

• Lots of documentation, including an end user manual.
• The upgrade of plone.org, which is not just an upgrade to the latest version, but also includes the usage of ZODB Blobs. The goal is to make plone.org the Plone equivalent of the cheeseshop. (There is even a new design for the plone.org front page.)
• There is seems to be a consolidation of products. Instead of just adding new ones, products are also removed and merged; the best solutions are coming together.

There are also areas that need attention:

• The end user manual needs to be translated to more languages.
• The documentation needs to be kept up-to-date (e.g. removing dead links).
• Plone can be promoted even more. The World Plone Day (November 7th, 2008) would be a nice opportunity. :)

The roadmap of the 3.x series of Plone is at the moment quite dull. That is, version 3 is supposed to be a stable release. No (big) new features are introduced. It’s about small fixes and adding just little things. There should be a maintenance release every month, with a minor release every 6 to 9 months. So in this case, being dull is a good thing.

Having said that, a new ZODB implementation might be forthcoming and Plone 3.2 (which should be released by the end of the conference) will be completely be ‘eggified’ and have a unified installer.

Plone 4 is all about making it smaller, easier and faster. Although it might be at the expense of some backward compatibility, it should be a big step forward.