I’m back at home after an awesome week sprinting on plone.org reboot project and Plone 5. The organization was amazing, thanks to Timo (@timostollenwerk) to make it so perfect. I want to thank to the Plone Foundation and GfU Cyrus AG (@schulungen) for sponsoring the event and specially thanks to my employer, UPCnet for allowing me to attend.
I was mainly focused in working for the reboot of plone.org site. We decided that we should finally will go for an initial launch on Plone 4.3, taking care of doing things right for ease an (eventual) future migration to Plone 5. We also wanted to use the same approach when using technologies than the ones used in the new Plone 5 theme: plonetheme.barceloneta.
Keeping this in mind, we are using the latest implementation of p.a.contenttypes, p.a.event, p.a.z3cforms and wildcard.foldercontents. We also wanted to integrate p.a.widgets into the project, but we’ve found that the current state of it (specially under Plone 4.3) was a bit unmature yet and we’ve hold it up until we will have a more stable version (which, after the sprint, it’s near to be ready!). We will try to include it as soon as we can.
The first two days we worked on make the theme look shiny, make it usable and put some pixel loving into it. As Barceloneta, we are using Bootstrap 3.1 and LESS to build the theme. We are using as much as possible the new feature of LESS 1.6.x series, import by reference, in order to keep CSS duplication as low as possible.
On wednesday I did an initial implementation of the new contributor profile pages as Carsten Senger (@csenger) started to work on the stats data retrieval engine. It will have the inital form of a nightly run script that will retrieve data from different sources (GitHub, StackOverflow, Gmane) for later show in the contributor profile. We already have a working version of the engine, as we will continue improving it and add new data sources.
For the member profile we did an initial implementation extending the user schema using the brand new p.a.users based on z3c.forms and using that data to feed the profile pages.
Asko Soukka (@datakurre) helped me to setup the ploneorg buildout for make plone.themepreview work for it. I have to way that he did an amazing job with Robot Framework and it’s a tool that every Plone project should have.
We had an open space for debating how the products page will be in the new plone.org site. We decided that we will get rid of the unmantained and bloated Products.PloneSoftwareCenter and siblings. We want a more lightweight and simple add-on product catalog powered with Dexterity that will have a reduced amount of metadata compared with the PSC one. The whole add-on products section will be powered by a faceted navigation. The add-ons releases will no longer be hosted in plone.org (PyPi server feature) as there is no point to have it twice in PyPi and in the site.
We will put in place a way for award add-on products with a “certified” badge. It will work based on the accomplishments of the product. There is already a list of best practices when developing an add-on product, like having an uninstall profile, have translations, etc. People will be able to send for review their add-on as they think it passes all requirements.
We will also reboot all the information for that catalog and no migration will be done. This will ensure that product owners will update the information for the products which are still maintained and alive in the catalog. Issue trackers (Poi) will also be deprecated too as there are plenty of tools out there (eg. GitHub issue tracker) that do the job more efficiently than it does.
On thursday I worked on making eea.facetednavigation and collective.cover play nicely with BS3.1. We will use c.cover to have a flexible layout on the home page and (potential) subhomes.
Unfortunately, we had no time to work on the home page tiles, but we will in the next weeks. Albert Casado (@albertcasado), who is the responsible for the new shiny Plone 5 toolbar and who did a terrific job on Barceloneta theme during the sprint will help me with that and to polish the theme itself.
As soon as possible we will have a demo site for you to see, I’ll keep you posted.