Yesterday marked the first important date in the Plone 3.0 development
process: the deadline for submissions of review bundles. The result is
an impressive number of twenty bundles:

PLIP 8 - Versioning
PLIP 48 - Use session instead of cookie plugin to store PAS authentication
PLIP 112 - XML Import / Export
PLIP 118 - Portlets engine based on PlonePortlets and Viewlets
PLIP 119 - Contextual help portlet
PLIP 121 - Asynchronous loading of content views
PLIP 122 - Edit-in-place mode for all basic field types
PLIP 125 - Ensuring link/reference integrity (removing 404 links)
PLIP 127 - Move properties to Edit screen using pre-loaded fieldsets
PLIP 142 - Componentise the global content menu
PLIP 144 - Generalised Next / Previous navigation
PLIP 145 - Locking
PLIP 148 - Move to CMF 2.1
PLIP 157 - Content rules engine
PLIP 168 - integrate iterate for checkin/checkout/staging
PLIP 171 - KSS / Azax to Plone
PLIP 172 - Wiki syntax support for all content
PLIP 173 - OpenID support
PLIP 174 - More configurable and reusable i18n features
PLIP 179 - Improved commenting infrastructure

Thank go to everyone who was involved in the development of those
bundles - the result of their work is going to make Plone 3.0 an awesome release.

The remainder of the Plone 3.0 time-line looks like this:

- September 25: framework team finished reviewing bundles
- October 8: final verdict for all bundles
- November 30: first beta release
- January 22: first release candidate
- March 12: release

During the next couple of weeks the framework team will review all
submitted review bundles. A first review is not final: the framework
team may have suggestions for improvement that make a bundle acceptable for merging. The window for making and reviewing those improvements ends on October 8.

During this phase we will be making alpha release with the accepted and merged bundles.

In the unofficial words of usability expert Alexander Limi, "Silly Americans assume everyone uses an english keyboard."...  Double parenthesis are easy to get to on almost all keyboards. 

Wicked aims to be simple and pervasive+ .  Double parenthesis don't collide with any other namespace, look nice in text, and are usable everywhere.

Tonight at the Seattle Plone users group meeting, Josh Livni of Umbrella Consulting showed off two really cool brand new products that bring GIS tools into Plone -- fast.

Pleiades OpenLayers brings OpenLayers, an open-source "slippy AJAX map" (think Google Maps) into Plone and makes it incredibly quick and simple to map Plone content against any base maps you can suck in over the internet, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft maps or any WMS map server source.

Pleades Geocoder is a simple product that allows you to instantly use Yahoo's geocoding API geocode Plone members based on the "location" field.  This can be trivially edited so that you can auto-geocode any content that has recognizable location to it. 

The barriers to doing amazing AJAXy mapping applications in Plone are dissolving incredibly fast.   Great stuff.

As we've talked about a zillion times on this blog--where there is passion, there is always a user kicking ass. If users are stuck in permanent beginner mode, and can't really do anything interesting or cool with a thing (product, service, etc.), they're not likely to become passionate. They grow bored or frustrated and then that "tool" turns to shelfware.

Are your users stuck with a small purple circle of capability within a huge green circle of possibilities? We have to keep asking ourselves:

1) Are we focusing too much on the tool (e.g. camera) rather than the thing our users are trying to do with the tool (e.g. photography)? And by "focusing", I mean that your documentation, support, training, marketing, and possibly product design are all about the tool rather than whatever the tool enables.

If we want passionate users, we have to help them do something cool... fast. And "do something cool" does NOT mean, "learn to use the interface." (Keep in mind that "cool" is in the eye of the beholder... one man's "really cool pivot tables" is another man's "lame Excel tricks")

2) Is the product just too damn hard to use even if a user does know what they want to do with it?

3) Do we encourage/support a user community that emphasizes mastery of the thing the tool is for? In other words, does your product/service have the equivalent of a FlickR community... to help give users the motivation for pushing past the "P"?

4) Do we train our users to become better at the thing they use the tool for, in a way that helps make the need for all those other features seem obvious?

Ok... so it's only 0.0.1 pre-pre-pre Alpha.  I don't care.

I want it. Plone needs it.

PloneFormGen.

    Previously we offered non-commercial organizations free unlimited usage of Enfold Desktop.  After having found numerous commercial companies using Enfold Desktop without purchasing licenses.  We have decided to add licensing to the software and give everyone five (5) free licenses.  Regardless of status everyone can use Enfold Desktop free of charge for up to five users.  We will work with NGO's on a case by case basis if we are going to offer them more than 5 licenses.

    Enfold Desktop compliments our other Windows products (Enfold Server and Enfold Proxy) which enable organizations to have a commercial vendor behind their Plone installation.  Enfold Systems is committed to lowering the bar for the adoption of the Plone CMS on the Windows platform throughout the world.  Effortless installation and risk free evaluation are some of our guiding software principles.

    This blog entry is not about pushing our software as much as letting people know that there is now a Desktop integration available for the Plone CMS (you can use our commercial Enfold Server or open source Plone).  I hope our Desktop integration provides a means for persons to evagelise Plone inside their organizations in a more persuasive way.  Seeing is believing.  And if they want to use our software for ease of evaluation and helps them spread Plone (even if they dont purchase it in the end) -- then we will have done our job.  We want to lower the bar for evaluation and consideration of the Plone CMS.

    Lastly the technological parts that make Enfold Desktop interesting and more relevent to the community.  The first one (which should be embraced by the entire Python community) is that Enfold Desktop is built 100% in the Python programming language.  Our extensions to win32com (Python library) to enable Shell Extensions have been used by numerous companies and some have told me in private they really appreciate the wrapping of these Windows API.  I simply want to say "Thank you for the feedback."

    The benefit of Plone 3.0 and beyond for consultants and communtiy is the plug-in architecture for Enfold Desktop.  Upon release of Desktop 3.0 - we will invest into some sample code.  We have released some sample code already that demonstrates auto-save capabilities in Enfold Desktop.  Other code and examples we have are enforcing metadata when content is Drag n Drop'ed into Desktop and/or created through Desktop.  We want to document the architecture and we believe people will find it so powerful that they will be able to solve unique business problems for their clients that only Enfold Desktop with its flexibility can offer.

    Don't hesitate to drop me a line.  alan at enfoldsystems is my email.  And remember to sign up the Seattle Plone Conference 2006.  Finally go to http://www.enfoldsystems.com/ to download 3.0 beta and remember to give us your feedback on the desktop community mailing list!