In the fall of 2014 we announced the formation of the Plone Intranet Consortium - a collaboration between Plone technology companies to develop a Plone based open source digital workplace platform.
Fast-forward to summer 2015: we've already done a Mercury "technology preview" release and are now in feature freeze, preparing for the 1.0 release, codename Venus, this summer.
As you can see in the video, for all of us it's very important to be part of the open source community that is Plone.
At the same time, we use a different process: design driven, which impacts our code structure and the way integrators can leverage the Plone Intranet platform.
Sharing and re-use
All of our code is open source and available on Github. In terms of re-use we have a mixed strategy:
First of all it's important to realize we're doing a design-driven product, not a framework. We have a vision and many components are closely integrated in the user experience (UX). From a UX perspective, all of Plone Intranet is an integrated experience. Sure you can customize that but you have to customize holistically. You cannot rip out a single feature and expect the UX for that to stand on it's own.
In the backend the situation is completely different. All the constituent packages are separate even if they live in one repo and one egg. You can install ploneintranet.microblog without installing the whole ploneintranet stack: i.e. the whole ploneintranet source needs to be there (at the python level) but you can load only the ploneintranet.microblog ZCML and GS and you'll be fine. All our packages have their own test suites which are run independently. Of course you need activitystream views to display the microblog - and that's frontend UX and one of the most complex and integrated parts of our stack, with AJAX injections, mentions, tagging, content mirroring and file preview generation.
Another example is search: a completely re-usable backend but you'd have to provide your own frontend. Our backend is pluggable - we currently support both ZCatalog and Solr engines and expect to also support Elastic Search in the future. We have documented our reasons for not reusing collective.solr.
Design and user experience are key
We don't believe that loosely coupled components with independent developer-generated frontends create a compelling user experience. Instead of working from the backend towards the frontend, we work the other way around and focus on creating a fully integrated, beautiful user experience.
The downside of that is that it becomes more difficult to reuse components independently. That's a painful choice because obviously it reduces open source sharing opportunities. We do open source for a reason, and you can see much evidence that we care about that in the level of our documentation, in our code quality, and in the careful way we've maintained independent backend packages, including listing component package dependencies, providing full browser layer isolation and most recently providing clean uninstallers for all our packages.
Plone Intranet is a huge investment, and we're donating all our code to the Plone community. We hope to establish a strong intranet sub-community while at the same time strengthening the vibrancy of the Plone community as a whole.