Magic Web Fairies

Wow I am way behind on blog entries. Been keeping them in notepad and analog notepad. Had to skip the 9am talk due to hotel chaos (have to change rooms) so got out late. Hope it was taped.

OK so on to the 10:30  talk

A Sneak Peak at Plone 3.0

Alexander Limi

Plone 3: Sneak Peek

Release Q1 2007 March hopefully

Various usual disclaimers. Entire presentation could be sci-fi

#1 versioning
history of mods, reverting revisions
differences bet revisions
per-type policies – you can decide which type gets versioned
replaceable backend

#2 in-place staging
let’s you work on one piece of content while another is “live”
buildt on top of cmfeditions
simple UI

#3 locking
uses WebDAV semantics
“stealable” locks – if doc was locked some ago and is no longer appropriate
locks are automatic on any edit action
tells you who locked it and how long ago
(can you make stealable admin only)

#4 Easier sharing
curent sharing page too painful, too long
New approach is streamlined, nice checkboxes

#5 Link integrity
tracks what internal resources are relying on each other
warns you if you try to delete an image that is used in a page, linked to, or in other way used (cool!)

Warning: Do you really want to fuck up your site? (OK it doesn’t really say that.)

#6 Generalized previous/next
if you are in a folder or album and you want to have previous / next navigation you can enable this. How are documents linked together I wonder?

(Note: all of this is production code and needs a little work)

#7 Fieldsets
Tons of tabs in plone, hard to add things. split up border under edit to have categories of information. looks sweet.
no page load when you go over each option. doesn’t go back to the server at all. completely accessible

#8 content rules engine
UI for admins to respond to events
examples:
move to folder on add
send email – can send email – you want to get notification when content is added or deleted
change workflow
pluggable (new events, new rule elements)

you have a rule system in plone where when certain events happen you can trigger other events.
UI in general works without coding but you will likely have to do some coding for more than the basic things

#9 portlets engine
UI for managing portlets
Portlets per:
folder, user, group
infrastructure to write advanced portlets

portlets in plone right now are just templates. you have to write lots of logic inside the portlet. this lets you manage the order of the portlet and you can list things like all items that have been changed since a certain date. (we need this)

#10 indexing support for Word/PDF
Not sure of state of this. if you put a word doc in it’s searchable and parseable.

#11 OpenID support
decentralized login/identity system
lets you use your URL as a login
in use by sites like Livejournal, technorati
plugins exist for wordpress, mediawiki, etc
Backend by companies like Verisign
available today and shipping with Plone 3

Defacto standard for centralized logins. You can use with 2.5 if you want it. It will ship iwth 3.0 but you’ll have to add product.

#12 Workflow improvements
more bundled workflows
workflow control panel

most people can’t tell that plone workflow is not just hardcoded but is actually quite flexible. Nice UI for this. You can remap workflows and tell it which state should correspond to the new state in the new workflow.
workflows that will ship: community workflow, web publ, internal, external

#13 Plone 3 and Zope 3 are in love
All new features using zope 3
Plone 3.0 includes Zope 2.10 + Zope 3.3
depends on CMF 2.1

#14 Better markup support
Wiki syntax support for all markup:
Even Word/OpenOffice
“wiki flavor, no wiki aftertaste” – add some elements of wiki that are nice.

New formats supported:
Markdown
Textile
Making it easier to select between them

#15 Ajax (yay!)
In-place editing
Inline validation
Improved UI and widgets
Less trips to the server
Still fully accessible
Making Plone more efficient

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Announcements:

Plone.net should be working now. Login is fixed.

picture outside at lunch

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Questions:
Large file handling?
You don’t want to put large files inside zodb.
Won’t be solved by 3.0 because zope 2.11 won’t be shipped in time.

large file handling thing is hard to get customers to pay for or invest in.
solution is close and supporting those people with resources and $ would go a long way.

pre-release testing
they will issue some alpha releases. do not use on production servers!
Perhaps next week an alpha will be out
the best testing is done by companies with sites with a lot of data, make a copy and trying a migration

how much testing has been done on migrations
2.0 to 2.1 switched all content types over to archetypes
2.1 to 2.5 few problems unless running specialized LDAPs
(generally a trivial migration unless you were running CMF member. but this is no longer a problem because of Remember and Membrane)

What will be deprecated in 3.0
not too much is being removed. gruf support is out for 3.0 so you’ll have to use PAS for that.

Myroslav asks something that I can’t hear
Limi says there was a screw up with 2.5 where a small script was removed and almost all 3rd party products failed. He says that will not happen in 3.0.
Additionally, Themes will not break when you update to 3.0. Adding some CSS for dynamic Ajax UI.
There will be new elements that you will need to potentially style.

Is there anything in 3.0 for placeless content… can you reuse content in several locations?
No. Perhaps can be a part of 3.5. Need a standardized way of doing these taxonomies and handling content in more structured ways than putting them in folders.

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So those are my notes from the talk which I can hardly remember now. I have no hope whatsoever that they are coherent but I saw a vid camera so we can all watch it later. Limi is hilarious. He and Joel Burton are tied for my favorite Voice of Plone.