Back row l to r: Alec Mitchell, Spanky Kapanka, Eric Steele, Ian Anderson, Ross Patterson, Luke Bannon, Cris Ewing, Andy Leeb, Cal Doval, Chris Calloway. Front row l to r: Elizabeth Leddy, David Glick, Steve McMahon, Fulvio Casali, Franco Pellegrini, Sally Kleinfeldt, Trish Ang. Photo by Trish Ang.
I recently returned from the Emerald Sprint, and I have to say that Plone 5 is starting to look pretty good. For developers, there is a solid core buildout that even I was able to run without a hitch. So if there’s a PLIP (Plone Improvement Proposal) or a feature that interests you, and you’ve been thinking about contributing – do it! The community awaits you with open arms. And what a great community! You don’t need to be a Python developer – Plone 5 is a Javascript-friendly development environment. We would love to have more Javascript developers and designers join our ranks. You won’t be sorry.
OOTB Plone 5 with the new editing toolbar on the left. Still a work in progress, you will be able to choose top or side placement, and icons, text, or both.
But UI improvements and new features are the real cause of excitement. The first thing Plonistas will notice is the new theme – people new to Plone won’t find it remarkable, just clean and modern, but we Plone folks have been looking forward to replacing Sunburst for a long time. In fact we’ve been looking forward to Plone 5 for a long time. After the community gained consensus about what Plone 5 will be, things got a bit bogged down. The Javascript rewrite was extensive. The new content type framework (Dexterity) had to gain maturity as a Plone 4 add-on. There was – and still is – much discussion over how to improve and streamline content editing and page layouts; ideas are being implemented as add-on products such as collective.cover.
Over the last few months the community has really picked up the pace on Plone 5. Supported by the Plone Foundation and numerous sponsors, there have been a series of productive sprints. The Emerald Sprint’s focus was on user management, registration, and login. A robust system of user permissions, groups, and roles is one of Plone’s most notable (and oldest) features and the concepts and underpinnings are still solid. However the UI is overdue for an overhaul and the old implementation layers have gotten pretty crufty.
Cris Ewing shows a mockup of the new registration process
The sprinters, led by David Glick, took a UI-first aproach which was fantastic. Before cracking open the laptops and diving into the code, we developed mockups of the new registration and login process and user management screens. It really helped that 2 of the 17 sprinters were UI/UX designers. Always try to get designers to come to your sprints!
The sprint gathered together a fantastic set of Plone gurus who were able to have in depth discussions of some of the thornier technical problems associated with users. For example, should user objects work like content objects? This discussion resulted in a concrete list of pros and cons and a better understanding of how to ameliorate potential problems if and when we decide to move to “contentish” users.
And of course software got developed. Teams worked on the Users and Groups control panel, member profile design and implementation, registration, log in, and forgotten password dialogs, and more. Read the summary report on plone.org for more details.
Plone 5 log in design.
