Sprinting towards Plone 5

The drive towards Plone 5 is gaining momentum as the goal seems to be in a reachable distance.

For the first time there actually is a state of Plone 5 that is can be shown to people who are interested in the future of Plone. The essential building-blocks of Plone 5 are starting to look presentable: The new barceloneta-theme is really nice and comes with the new toolbar and the new widgets.

Don't get me wrong, there is still quite some work to be done before a final release but the first alpha-release is in the making and the current state can actually be shown. These screenshots are from a fresh build of the coredev.buildout.

To reach Plone 5 the Plone-community is organizing a staggering number of sprints. My sprint-plan for 2014 looks like this: Cologne, Munich, Munich (again), Sorrento, Berlin, Bristol.

I recently attended the cathedral-sprint in Cologne, organized by the tireless Timo Stollenwerk and generously sponsored by GFU Cyrus AG. Timo, whose sole purpose in life sometimes seems to be to keep Jenkins happy, organized another impressive display of the spirit of the Plone-community as 30 people from around the world gathered there to work in groups on pushing Plone 5 towards readiness. It is great to see so many originally separate efforts coming together smoothly and making a whole new thing that will be at the core of Plone 5.

Together with Johannes Raggam, Wolfgang Thomas and some help from others I was continuing the work on plone.app.contenttypes and we made good progress. The current version 1.1b2 of the new default-content-types for Plone 5 has a multitute of bugfixes and some relevant changes compared to version 1.0:

• Collections are now a behavior that can be enabled on any content-type. The collection-type is basically a folder with that behavior.
• The shiny new event-type now uses the behaviors provided by plone.app.event including support for recurring events and timezones.
• Richtext-fields are now a behavior shared by most types.
• We now have migrations from 14 different content types to the new types including migrations for four (!) iterations of the event-type.

I have been using plone.app.contenttypes since before the project officially existed and I think every plone-developer should give it a try and report any issues especially regarding migrations to make it safe to ship with Plone 5.

It was a real pleasure being reunited with old friends and making new ones. It is especially encouraging that even at sprints there are always new people showing up and contributing to Plone.

The next big sprint on my agenda is the Wine-and-Beer-Sprint in Munich. For the second time we are organizing this sprint together with our friends from Syslab.com and again it is a double-sprint with a leg in Munich and one in Capetown. We will continue working towards Plone 5. The necessary tasks to get Plone 5 out of the door are summarized in this ticket: https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/184.

Register now since we only have a limited amount of places! If you really need additional incentive to attend, here they come: A fine selection of Single Malt Whiskeys, a great sprint-location that is accessible 24h, Sichuan Hot Pot and white sausages (not to be mixed).

The Wine and Beer-sprint is is preceded by the DocSprint (also in Munich) that focuses on consolidating, improving and versioning(!) the documentation for Plone.

See you in Munich and elsewhere!