WebLion members to hold key roles in Plone 4 development

The WebLion teams have been in the trenches for nearly four years, developing and integrating internal and external Plone products and working with our local and international friends.

This has provided an opportunity for the team to grow and to develop some super skills and expertise.

It is not surprising that this steady growth is now starting to pay off for the WebLion team, Penn State and the community at large. Evidence of WebLion contributions can be seen in their selection for key roles in the Plone 4 release currently under development.

Plone 4 Framework Team Selected

WebLion team contributions to the Plone community are starting to gain greater notice and mutual respect from the core Plone develop community. One recent recognition of WebLion's contributions to the community is the selection of Erik Rose to the Plone 4 Framework team. Erik will have an opportunity to have significant input to the development of the platform, as well as represent the the needs of the Education sector to a much greater degree.

Plone Foundation member, Steve McMahon states, "the new team was chosen by current and past framework team members. There was an excellent group of nominations to choose from, and most of the deliberations were concerned with getting the right mix of skills and background."

Steve also assures the Plone developer community, "the Plone 4 Framework Team will operate simultaneously with the Plone 3 Framework Team, which will continue to produce incremental improvements to Plone 3.x while Plone 4 is under development."

Congratulations Erik Rose!

Baarn UI Sprint 2009

Further evidence of WebLion's impact on the Plone community is the recent invitation to WebLion developer, Eric Steele, to participate in the exclusive Baarn UI Sprint. Eric's release of GloWorm has been been a huge success. GloWorm is a Firebug-like tool that allows you to delve into the code (TAL, METAL, Python) underlying your site; a point-and-click interface lets you highlight something on your screen and see what template or script produced it; you can reorder, show/hide, and edit viewlets inline.

Baarn UI Sprint organizers say that the sprint will focus on "working out the concepts involved in a next generation user interface for Plone and prototype them... We'll be making an effort to revolutionize content editing, content types, dynamic/composite pages (the classic "navigation page problem") and the basic interactions between editors and content. Plone 4 will be incredibly cool to work with!"

Eric's experience developing GloWorm figures into these plans. At the recent Plone Conference 2008, Alexander Limi, co-founder of Plone, spoke at length about the importance of GloWorm to the future of the Plone UI and content creation.

Congratulations Eric Steele!