Plone 4 – An interview with Zope News

Hi, Eric. You are the release manager of Plone 4, which is expected to be released in late 2009. Do you think we will have a final release of Plone 4 this year?

I certainly hope so. Our current schedule aims for a December 1 final release. I really don't want to have to spend my Christmas break packaging up a Plone release, but we'll see how it goes. The Plone Foundation asked for a release before year's end and that's given us about 7 months from start to finish to get Plone 4 shipped.

We set up a very aggressive schedule and, so far, have been right on track. Because of the aggressive timeline, we'd planned to make the featureset much smaller than previous major releases. Surprisingly, we received a record 57 PLIPs (PLone Improvement Proposals), 42 of which were accepted for consideration by the Framework Team. The developers were given only six weeks to complete their initial implementations and 37 of those 42 PLIP implementations have been submitted for review. That's an 88% return. Amazing. I was telling myself that we'd be lucky to see ten. The Plone developers have met this challenging schedule head-on and are doing absolutely amazing work. I could not be prouder.

Browsing the accepted proposals, I think the major improvements are BLOB support in the ZODB by default, the change to SecureMailHost, the usage of TinyMCE instead of Kupu as default richtext editor, the new collections backend, the new commenting infrastructure, a redesigned search form, and content import and export. Would you agree and can you elaborate on these changes?

As release manager, I feel somewhat obligated to say that I love each and every one of my PLIPs equally. That said, there are definitely some that are going to generate more buzz than others. Foremost, and the reason this release even exists, is the move to Python 2.6, Zope 2.12, and CMF 2.2. Being able to depend to an officially-supported, more efficient version of Python is something that everybody has wanted. Between those three upgrades, there's certainly a lot to for us be happy about: optimizations, packaging, BLOB support, mailhost improvements. I have to give a lot of praise to Hanno Schlichting and David Glick, they've handled the majority of that integration and are saving me from having to worry about it at all.

TinyMCE is more actively maintained than our current editor, Kupu, and has proven to be much more extensible. It will be forming the basis for the Deco page layout editor that will be coming in a future release. Introducing it now saves us from some of the problems we ran into with Kupu in later Plone 3 releases and exposes the community to it before Deco arrives.

There has been a lot of work done to improve Collections: a much more intuitive UI with inline updating and live results, simpler templates, and a much cleaner backend. Four Digits just put out a writeup describing the results of their sprint. It's a good read.

One PLIP that I really think isn't getting the attention it should be is the indexing and search of East Asian languages. It's been something that has held back adoption of Plone there and could open up a large new market for us.

Plone 4 will have guided tours for new Plone users driven by Amberjack. What is this all about? Will I be able to make my own guided tour of my custom Plone site?

Unfortunately, the Amberjack implementation didn't make it in before the deadline, so we won't be seeing it in the 4.0 release. I'll be pushing to get it into 4.1 though. The idea is that we'll be able to provide walkthroughs of different tasks throughout the site. So if a user is having trouble adding a new Collection, for example, they'd be able to click a help link to be taken through the process: "click this highlighted button", "add your Collection's title here" and that sort of thing. Tours should be theme-agnostic, so existing tours will integrate well with your site, and new ones can be added without much trouble. Nate Aune showed it off in a recent lightning talk and gave a great overview of how Amberjack integrates with Plone.

Is there a preview of the new Plone default skin?

It's still very much a work-in-progress. Alex's goal was to create something more modern, and could be legitimately considered for use as a corporate site with very little customization. The CSS and HTML behind it should be a lot simpler and much easier to use as a starting point for a custom theme.

Thank you very much!

Thank you!