Keynote: The State of Plone (Matt Hamilton and Eric Steele)
Matt Hamilton, president of the Plone Foundation Board and Eric Steele, release manager, talk about the state of Plone.
The last 12 months
The last year, five Plone conferences took place up until the current conference. There were 500–600 attendees on the four conferences, the Plone conference 2011 not included.
Plone 4.2 has been released and Plone 4.3 is in alpha state currently. Most work is done during sprints. Eric counted 12 sprints over the last year. Development is happening at a very fast pace now! In the last year 5597 commits were done by 208 contributors. Last month 66 contributors committed and 13 of them were new contributors.
Matt is also very happy with how many countries participated in World Plone Day. The map however does show a big gap in Africa and Asia. We should try to give the local communities there more energy.
Recently the 60th Plone Tuneup was held. This time 31 developers attended and 34 out of 70 tickets were closed. A great success.
The Plone Roadmap is an important—living—document that is updated every six months. Its goals: iteration, more frequent releases, introducing new technologies early (before they become standard).
This year Plone Core migrated to GitHub. This makes the life of Eric a lot easier since merges in Subversion were a nightmare. It also lowers the barrier to contribute. Much of the Collective repository has also moved to GitHub.
Although the experienced developers probably do not see the installers, they are the first thing someone new to Plone sees. Last year a new Windows installer was created. This one is much more native for Windows users. And it uses the same base buildout as other installers. This makes switching platforms a lot easier. Other approaches are also investigated: Bitnami, Turnkey, Ploud.
In the area of quality assurance: a lot of tickets in Trac have been cleared, bug reporting has been simplified and tickets are triaged. Jenkins, Travis CI and Robot Framework are used to perform automated testing.
The next decade
The Plone Foundation Board deals with the intellectual property and trademark issues. The Roadmap team ‘determines’ the direction of Plone and gathers input from the community to do so. The Framework team deals with the code itself and sets the direction what goes in each release and what does not.
Three areas of focus: approachability, integration and involvement. Documentation is the biggest sore point. There is a lot already, but it is not always actively maintained and not all new features/code has documentation. Writing/translating documentation is a great way to get started if you want to become involved in the community.
The UI team is going to review some of the core features. Content rules for example are awesome but are not used enough because they are complex. Collections are another example: they have been completely redone so it’s easier to use them.
To make the development for Plone easier, plone.api has been created. It should have been done way earlier! By realising that we didn’t need an API for everything this became possible. Note: they wrote the documentation for it first.
In the past we talked about the three D’s: Diazo (new theming), Dexterity (new content types) and Deco/Tiles (new layout system). These things allow us to be a bit more Pythonic. You could e.g. use Diazo combined with Pyramid. Diazo is already there since Plone 4.2 (known as plone.app.theming), Dexterixy is in Plone 4.3, Deco/Tiles will be in Plone 4.4 or 5.
Over the years it became harder to theme a Plone site. But the new theme editor for Diazo, created by Martin Aspeli, really lowers the barriers to give a Plone site a new look. But it’s not only an easy way to get started, the result can also be used by a more experienced person to pick up where the ‘novice’ left off.
To make contributing easier, the contributor agreement process is being revised. New contributors will get a welcome email with an introduction on why, how and where we do things. Mentorship is also on the radar to help the new developers.
Call to action
The biggest problem for Plone, according to Eric, is organisational: we are not taking enough opportunity of the capabilities available in the community.
Eric asks us to think about three things wrong with the code, community, or process of Plone. Please find someone with matching ‘things’ and act upon it! What are you going to do to make Plone better this year?