International FacultyStaffDirectory team gels at Plone Conference

Accomplishments

• Being able to talk and wave our arms in person, Cris (University of Washington) and I made major architectural decisions which will drive the next few versions of FSD. Many of these came from walking across the room to meet with Martin Aspeli (U.K.), who gave us a live tour of how he solved some extensibility problems similar to ours in his contentrules package. That conversation saved us weeks of trying to suss it out on our own and will make future versions of FSD simpler as well as insanely flexible. Watch for Departments, Committees, Classifications, and Specialties to each gain the abilities of the others and for the ability to write extenders that apply only to people in certain groupings.
• Andreas Jung (Germany) joined us for the first day of the sprint. Andreas is the release manager of Zope 2, making him one of the most influential and knowledgeable people in the whole Plone world. His contributions had been variously welcome and confusing to us in the past, but being able to speak with him live allowed us to finally iron all that out. We all finally decided to split out his work on bibliography integration into a separate plugin, and he released the first version right there at the sprint. He's since released two more, a spritely pace of development aided by being decoupled from the core. Professors can now display lists of their publications on their profile pages!
• Federico and Gildardo joined us from Carlos de La Guardia’s team at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The time we spent acclimating them was well invested, as they've already fixed a bug. We look forward to our future collaboration with UNAM!
• Michael Davis of the University of Oxford, who had never worked with us before, undertook the refactoring of our entire installation machinery to use GenericSetup, Plone's new configuration system. Bravo!
• Dan Timmons, Cris Ewing, and I reworked our documentation from a user's perspective, including explicit installation instructions for 2.5.x and 3.x.x for both buildout-based and old-fashioned installation methods. This was sorely needed and should cut down on support requests. Federico and Hidalgo threw in their help in testing it.
• Cris, Jim, and I fixed a longstanding bug where downloaded vCards didn't display their images.
• I merged Andreas's miscellaneous fixes branch into trunk and polished for release.
• Last but certainly not least, the sprint culminated in the release of version 2.1, which we've been trying to do for months. Having all the decision-makers in one room with no interruptions for a weekend was just the impetus needed to finally push it over the edge.