Plone Release Manager Wichert Akkerman sent the following email to the plone-developers list today, outlining the schedule for Plone 3.1, which will end with a final release in March 2008.  Plone 3.1 will be a small release with a few new features and no major architectural changes.  It will be a seamless and safe migration from Plone 3.0.

In coordination with the new framework team I am happy to be able to announce the timeline for the next Plone feature-release: Plone 3.1. The release process for 3.1 has very specific goals:

Safe changes only: since this is a minor release which should not destabilize Plone 3.x only changes that are risk-free will be considered. This means that no or very minimal migration steps are allowed, everything has to be properly tested, documentation has to be in order and the user interface has to be finalized. This also means that 3.1 will be based on the 3.0 codebase: Plone trunk has far too many major changes already.

Do not overload the framework team: the deadlines are fast and strict, so making it easy for them to rest proposals is important. The best way to do that is to create a buildout based on the latest Plone 3.0.x release and include only the changes relevant for that proposal.

Quick release schedule: we do not want to take 9 months to get this release it. This means that all proposals have to be completely done and polished in order to be acceptable. The migrations, if any, have to be in place and working, there have to be working tests and the user interface must be complete.

This is the timeline for 3.1:

  2007-12-14 : PLIPs for all features have to be finished and submitted

  2007-12-21 : framework team gives verdict on PLIPs only, not an implementation

  2008-01-19 : review bundles have to be submitted to the framework team

  2008-02-02 : framework team completes reviews

  2008-02-08 : 3.1 pre-release tagged

  2008-02-11 : 3.1 pre-release with installers released

  2008-02-15 : 3.1 release candidate tagged

  2008-02-18 : 3.1 release candidate with installers released

  2008-02-29 : 3.1 final tagged

  2008-03-02 : 3.1 final with installers released

Note that there is a change from the procedure we used for Plone 3.0: there is now an extra PLIP-review step. This has been added to allow us to check of a proposal is not too invasive or for some other reason undesirable for 3.1. That makes sure that nobody will be trying very hard to make a deadline only to hear that their work is not going to be considered.

As you can see this is an ambitious schedule. This means that we have to be very strict in what will be accepted and what won't. There is no shame in missing a deadline - we are all busy people and sometimes a deadline is just not attainable. Anything that does not make it in can be reconsidered for 3.2 or 4.0.

On a whim (it was planned 2 days ago), some of the Seattle Crew decided to get together this weekend and sprint.  The goal is ambitious, but simple: to fix a bunch of bugs and add futures to increment the releases of our Plone/Salesforce.com integration products.  I'm hosting in good ol' Ballard, Washington.

Pictures of jonstahl, healingKnee, jessesnyder, brianfive, and davisagli below:

This is a fun post recognizing the role of open source software and breaking routines in learning new programming patterns and paradigms.

7 Reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails

Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say” paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines. I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby. But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now!

This story articulated an idea that I have been thinking about for a while - the ways in which developers working on open source software enter into an educational relationship with the software and the community (sometimes indirectly, mediated through the code).

I have often appreciated all that Plone has taught me about the domain of content management, component architectures, extensible software design, internationalization, test driven development, responsible release management, etc etc. I know that it has taught me well since when I walk up to new pieces of complex software like Sakai or Drupal the concepts are familiar and often isomorphic. I can vouch that exposure to Plone has helped designers I know with stretch their CSS skills, improve the accessibility of their sites, and more cleanly separate presentation from logic.

I have also made the case that for an organization to work on software in isolation is bit like having a conversation with yourself. At first you might arrive at some new insights, but its really hard to learn anything new in a hermetically-sealed vacuum chamber. The software world transforms so quickly that it is a Sisyphean task for any one person or organization to track. Joining a community, even if it is through the indirect, intermediary object of code, is a great way to continue learning and stay on top of emerging trends. The notion that learning happens through dialog is an old one; the notion that working with open source software is a form a dialog with the authors is a bit less obvious.

My main critique of Derek's post is that he doesn't explicitly acknowledge the fact that Rails is open source, which is precisely what enabled him to learn so much from the framework. This isn't just a matter of attribution, it has practical implications for being able to continue learning new tricks over time.  If he had realized that Rails-the-software embodied the knowledge of the Rails-the-community, he might not have been so quick to venture off and write his very own framework. I am not arguing that he should have steered clear of php, but he does not explain why he decided to roll his own framework as opposed to joining forces with Cake or another existing php framework, or at least using an existing php templating system. With a more explicit understanding of the origins of the knowledge that Rails-the-software captures, he may have appreciated the potential future gains of remaining part of some community.

While it is possible to learn something from proprietary frameworks, "learning" is fundamentally about the open exchange of knowledge and meaning, which are values intrinsic to F/OSS. While you can learn something from a .NET api, you can't step through the entire stack of software in the debugger. Perhaps more importantly, the cultural tendencies on an open project support constructionist poking and prodding (dare I say, hacking?).

Many of us are familiar with the One Laptop Per Child project, which is making technology and information more accessible. Eben Moglen talked about this at his keynote at the 2006 Plone Conference (link to video, youtube version). What struck me as most powerful about the project was the clear, concise design principles. From the principles, you know exactly what the project is, and without any of those things, it would not still be OLPC.

At the Moglen talk, I asked about what Plone's design principles are. The question was more for the community, and a lot of people seem interested in the question (and it's answer!) over the last year...yet nothing happened. So, a year later, I started an informal survey at the Naples conference.

With the idea of making a draft of what Plone's core design principles are, I have been asking people around the conference, including core developers, board members, integrators, end users, new developers,...though there is obviously a diversity that we would expect from our community, I am trying to synthesize here the responses, with the intent of submitting the words of the community back to the community for review :)

And with no further ado...my attempt at articulating Plone core values:

1. Easy to use (to add/edit content)!
Responses: Easy to use (highest hits of any), usability (high number of hits), intuitive

This is the bread and butter of Plone, the part that every one of us experiences when we see it and use it, and the fundamental part of . Plone's commitment to usability since the beginning is apparent in the product and the community, and it is core to Plone to make it easy to use for content management.

2. Approachable
Responses: sensible defaults, easy to get, easy to deploy, easy to download and install, opportunity/potential, giving technical people (though not necessarily developers) a great system that they can gradually get more into the customizing with a steady and approachable learning curve.

This principle is about making it easy for people to get into Plone and get hooked on how cool it is, and then be brought through a manageable learning curve as they do more of their own custom implementations. It means out of the box, the settings make sense and that we empower people with tools that give them lots of potential. It also means that smart scripters (even without Plone development experience) can get into doing custom work also.

3. "Developer Nectar", ie Built to Last, quality framework
Responses: Safe customizations, smart adaptability, easy to extend, extensible, easy to develop, user centric, use case driven, best practices, web standards, accessibility, good error messages, cross platform, test-driven, solid development, open source, scalable (up and down), passion for the technology (doing things the right way, even if it is a new technology).

Moving on from those getting into the customizations, there is the more serious development work in Plone, which is solidly built on best practices (web standards, accessibility, development process, test-driven, etc). This is about helping developers learn about and adhere to good practices, as they get deeper in the system, by having defined processes and practices. It is also about using cool technologies that keep developers interested and having fun. Finally, it means that we provide direction to the developers that originates in the way people want to use the system, captured as use cases.

4. Fun! Community!
Responses: fun, fun atmosphere, entertaining, community (one of the more popular responses, though without certainty that it applies to Plone the software, but knowing it is essential to survival and sustainability of Plone)

Some intertwined concepts here, that I am calling Fun & Community. First on the fun: this is about being fun to use and develop with, as well as being a thriving community with amazing people. The community is an obvious part of anyone who already participates. It is amazing, whether it is the "mindshare" or finding others working in your area, or just having a great time with passionate, bright people, Plone's community is a huge asset. Without it Plone wouldn't be Plone. The community also provides lots of support, which helps sustain it and make it more approachable.

So, that's the core. Definitely needs language refinement and maybe also refactoring, but I submit it for your review :)

There is one item I am on the fence about. It is something that is not core now, though important, and which, if it were to be core, would affect certain decisions and involve some tradeoffs. That item, is "collaboration" as a use case for Plone the software (there is tons in the community itself, which is not what I am referring to here). There are definitely some collaborative features in Plone, but most are through addons or configurations (a few new ones in 3.0, but still lacks several).

Conclusions

The idea of core values or design principles is that they are the things that never change, that, if removed, would take away the Ploneness. The core principles don't necessarily have to unequivically describe the current product. The fact that we don't already have these principles articulated means that it may not be true, but it should help us to enhance the product in the future.

This is being submitted for comment and review from the community. The idea is *not* (did you miss that? I said NOT) to make a long list. Core principles lists should be as small as possible; the goal is not a comprehensive list of things we like, but instead the smallest list of things we can't live without.

One note about timeliness...as announced at the conference in the State of Plone talk, there will be a Plone visioning/strategy meeting in Feb 2007 at the GooglePlex. I strongly believe that we need to identify the core principles[1] before we engage in visioning, so here's my small contribution to that.

From talking with others in this process, I got a lot of good, complementary ideas as well as clarification on this excercise. I want to thank Paul, Jon, Martin for supporting the inquiry process. 

References:

[1] The book, Built to Last, is a classic presentation of the concept of core values as necessary for a company/organization/movement's longterm success. It defines these as the small collection of values that *never change*. These are the heart, stability of the institution.

The Product Developers email list, which was started in early 2007 as an outgrowth of Martin Aspeli's session at Plone Conference 2006, has really blossomed into a vibrant, active community of folks working collaboratively on add-on products for Plone.

It's a tremendous resource if you're developing an add-on product, looking for advice about an existing add-on product, or looking to make suggestions for how you'd like to see an add-on product evolve.   I plan to follow this list a LOT more closely from here on out, and I encourage you to as well.

You can subscribe via email or read it on the web via Nabble.

The amazing and indefatigable Darci Hanning is helping organize a "social source" sponsorship effort to raise $2000 to support Lupa Zurven's work to update CalendarX for Plone 3.0.  CalendarX is a widely-used calendaring add-on Product for Plone -- if you'd like to see it updated for Plone 3.0, now's the time to join together with other Plone community members and make it happen.

Lupa's sponsorship goal is $2000.  As of this morning, there are $700 in pledges.  They're using Fundable.org (a Plone-powered site!), which lets you make a pledge in any amount from $10 on up, and you'll only pay if the $2000 goal is reached.   With $1300 to go, we only need another 26 people to pledge $50 each. That's peanuts, especially compared with the number of folks who've benefitted from CalendarX over the years.

This is the funding model we used last year to sponsor a round of work on Ploneboard, and has also helped drive the GetPaid project forward. It's a great way to share the load of sponsoring useful products for which there isn't a single big customer. 

I hope you'll join me in sponsoring CalendarX.

Update - Tuesday, 5:30pm PDT: We're now at $950, nearly halfway there!

If you are currently a member of the Plone Foundation, and wish to remain so, you need to renew your membership for 2008.   Consider this a gentle reminder.

Plone Foundation membership committee chair Godefroid Chappelle explains:

I'm excited to read that the crew at Enfold are organizing Ploneability Higher Ed, a free, one-day event in Houston, Texas, on November 8th that will introduce and showcase Plone for the academic sector. 

Ploneability Higher Ed is a one-day conference for college and university Web content managers, developers and site administrators to connect and share success stories involving Plone, the open-source content management system.

• Alan Runyan, Plone project cofounder, on what’s next in open-source content management
• Kurt Bendl on the University of Louisville’s Plone rollout (more than 150 sites and counting), which has produced benefits for content managers, marketing and IT
• Christian Vinten-Johansen and Mike Halm on Penn State’s WebLion, a customized version of Plone plus consulting, development and training services
• Cameron Cooper on Connexions, the collaborative, Plone-powered course materials repository that was launched at Rice University and has received substantial news media attention
• Josten Ma on how nearly 40 Plone sites and a custom skinning product support the University of Houston’s effort to reach the top tier of U.S. research institutions

Ploneability Higher Ed is free, but seating is limited.

In addition, there will be two related events, on the day before and after.

Full details are here.

From Xavier Heymans of ZeaPartners comes word of an interesting opportunity for the Plone community to advocate for Open Source in European e-government, and to promote the PloneGov initiative. 

The PloneGov initiative is in the running for an EU "2007 eGovernment Award" for "most innovative good practice."  You can vote for Plone.  Xavier writes:

Winning this award will highlight the maturity achieved by the Open Source collaborative model as a pragmatic way to tackle IT challenges in society. You may register to vote until Friday, September 7th, and can vote until September 20th.

PloneGov's project description: http://www.epractice.eu/cases/plonegov

Anton Stonor and the crew at Headnet.dk are hosting the Copenhagen Performance Sprint 2007 in early November:

Anton writes: "We'll spend four days on making Plone run faster and have fun in the capital of Denmark, Copenhagen."  Sounds pretty good to me!

There are still a few seats left, you can sign up online.

Update: It's not Sept 1-4th, it's November 1-4.  :-)

We had 23 participants from all over the country, including two European sprinters from Berlin and Finland.

One of the sprinters was Rocky Burt, the lead developer of the Plone4Artists products. Hailing from Canada, Rocky conducted two days of Zope 3 training right before the sprint.

If you missed the course in Boston, you're in luck! This unique class Zope 3 Training for Plone Developers will also be offered again right before the Plone Conference in Naples.

There were also 8 remote sprinters from far away places such as Japan, Australia, Italy and Switzerland, who tuned into the live video stream and collaborated via the #plone4artists IRC chat channel. See the full list of participants and photos from the event.

The focus of the sprint was to improve the multimedia capabilities of Plone, and in particular to fix bugs and prepare the Plone4Artists suite of products for a new release.

I'm happy to report that thanks to the hard work of the sprinters, we successfully made new releases of many Plone4Artists products: Plone4ArtistsAudio, Plone4ArtistsVideo, Plone4ArtistsSite, Plone4ArtistsCalendar, etc.

Sprint reports

There were several teams dedicated to working on various topics including the Plone4Artists products as well as syndication, licensing, RESTful interfaces and iPlone, an iPhone optimized theme for Plone.

• Audio
  
• Video
  
• Calendar
  
• Uploading
• Large files
  
• Syndication
  
• Licensing
  
• RESTful interfaces
  
• iPlone

In the press

There was a journalist from IDG who attended the sprint, and published two articles about the event which appeared in several IDG publications.

LinuxWorld and InfoWorld magazine articles about the Plone4Artists sprint:

"Sprinting to create open-source content management"

"You're never alone with Plone"

Screencasts

Jonathan Lewis made an excellent screencast introduction to the Plone4ArtistsAudio product Thanks Jonathan! We still need screencasts for the calendar and video products if you'd like to help out.

Online Demo

If you want to try out the Plone4Artists products but don't have time to install them yourself, you can demo them on the http://plone4artists.com site. Please report any bugs you find to the trackers!

Want to help?

There are many ways to get involved in the project, even if you are not a developer. We need you to download the products and test them out, reporting any bugs that you find to the issue trackers.

Join the mailing list and ask questions in the #plone4artists IRC channel. We can always use help in writing documentation and making screencasts - short videos which demonstrate the software's functionality.

Lightning talks

There were a number of very interesting lightning talks given at the sprint. These have been video recorded and will be made available in the near future. Subscribe to the Plone4Artists mailing list to be notified when they are published.

Sponsors

Many thanks to our sponsors without whom this sprint would not have been possible: Christian Science Monitor, The Nature Conservancy, Oxfam America, Friends of the Earth International, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, New England Wildflower Society, Abstract Edge and Jazkarta. ShinyWhiteBox.com also donated two licenses for its excellent iShowU software for making screencasts.

If your organization is using the Plone4Artists products, please consider sponsoring the Plone4Artists project. Your financial contribution makes it possible to continue developing the products and having sprints to grow the community.

The Future

We are planning to continue the work at the post-conference sprint in Naples. There will be a multimedia track and we hope to get 1.0 final versions of all the products out at that time.

We are also working on some new products (Plone4ArtistsPodcast, ContentTagging, Plone4ArtistsRevverVideo, Plone4ArtistsImage, Plone4ArtistsTheme), which you can read about on the Plone4Artists products release announcement.

And we are working on a buildout to make it easier to install and setup a Plone4Artists site.

Thanks again to all of the sprinters who came to Boston and made the sprint a success!

-Nate

With a huge thanks to the authors of Updating add-on products for Plone 3.0, Limi, Martin, Geir, Sisi, and others, it was a breeze to get Salesforce Base Connector working for Plone 3.0.  We just pushed out another release, so that it doesn't appear DOA after putting out a non-3.0-compliant release last Friday.  It's still very experimental, but now testable with the latest and greatest.

At midnight PDT on August 21st, the Plone Team released Plone 3.0, capping off a huge year of work.  This is a big day in the history of Plone.

My congratulations and deepest thanks to all the folks who made it happen.  I'm really looking forward to using it.

Rio Ceballos, Córdoba, Argentina: Born was one GetPaid, child of Plone and Community. The excited parents shared in the joy of seeing their combined contributions resulted in something amazing: Plone and Community had just given birth to a commerce system! The first breath...er...transaction was processed today by authorize.net!

Certificate of Birth: GetPaid de Plone

Time of birth: FairSource retreat day 4, 5:55pm
Place of birth: Rio Ceballos, Córdoba, Argentina
Given name: GetPaid
Family name: Plone
Weight at birth: 394 Kb
Delivery method: tarball

GetPaid's approach to ecommerce is to be (a) useful out of the box and (b) flexible (find more at www.plonegetpaid.com). This approach reflects the value that Plone itself provides: a full feature set that can easily be deployed complemented by a flexible system that can be customized and extended for particular use cases. The use cases targeted for the current release included basic donation processing and simple stores.

GetPaid provides the tools needed to easily integrate those features into a site: a cart, checkout, workflow, payment processor integration, administrative screens, and end user interface. At the DocComm sprint, held at Google June 25-29, over a dozen people contributed to the features that now make up GetPaid. In addition to the front-end features, the sprinters created a testing framework and created an entire set of test scripts to ensure quality now and in the future. The sprinters and organizers - all volunteers - were hosted and fed by Google, fueled by Guayaki yerba mate, and supported by several sponsors from the community who made the event possible.

That work was advanced by a dozen FairSource developers in Argentina working alongside the product's lead architect, Kapil Thangavelu. An issue that we were reminded of in the Google sprint when Ofer dropped in to the channel was that we need to have the product internationalized, which led to a sprint! Sprinting began at the Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre (Regional Free Software Conference) with a day of i18n sprinting, which then turned into a group effort to work towards the release at the FairSource retreat organized by ifPeople. After months of work, the first processed transaction went through today (see the message from authorize.net)

Led by Kapil Thangavelu (hazmat), core Plone developer, founder of ObjectRealms, and author of many products for Plone and Zope, the sprinters worked together pair programming towards the goal of the week: getting paid! The group generated ideas and implemented side by side; they also created, tracked and closed issues (with the help of a remote sprinter in Italy) on the project's Google Code are: code.google.com/p/getpaid . Each day twenty people would gather in our instant messaging channel on IRC (#getpaid) to follow what was going on, rallying the sprinters, and ask questions.

Among the accomplishments of the GetPaid contributors:

• Shape the scope of the Red Ochre release around the donation use case.
  
• an elegant Zope 3 based framework.
  
• Integrate a payment processors (Authorize.net, and others in progress)
• Create a shopping cart and means of adding items to it
• Internationalization of the Plone and Zope products
  
• Provide a deployment mechanism for the product (via buildout/ploneout) for technical users to quickly get set up.
• Integrate user information collection and registration into the checkout process
• Order management interface to track both site-wide transactions (and status) as well as to provide end users a view of their own transactions
• Tests! Unit, doc, and functional tests

The future looks bright for this newborn! GetPaid still has a lot of work to be a complete system, but is near the point of its first release. Next on the horizon is:

• A release!
  
• Documentation of API and roadmap
• Set up demo site with latest version of products (dev.plonegetpaid.com)
  
• Clean up integration of workflow and payment processors
• Make backups possible
  
• Organize additional developers and funding to build out for specific use cases of "premium content", "pay to submit", and advanced store features.
• Build a product catalog, document and provide an interface for categories
  
• Make the UI sexy with AJAX :)
• Add lots more usability improvements
  

The Recipe: Beans and Rice

For those who are interested in more technical information...check the directory where your buildout ran and meet getpaid.core and PloneGetPaid. They part of the elegance of the system's design: getpaid.core is a pure Zope product, while PloneGetPaid provides Plone integration and configuration. (For those unfamiliar with the latest in Zope/Plone, the two products are designed to work together as a system that, architecturally speaking ties us to CMF, but that is built in Zope 3 (and then bridged back to run in Zope 2 by Five))

The approach to integrating commerce with a site is to be able to make any content in a Plone site "payable" by providing a "marker interface". This trick, inspired by the Plone4Artists project, allows GetPaid to add interfaces and information to the site without actually changing the existing content (thanks, Zope 3!). The system is built using Zope 3 technologies for interfaces, views, viewlets, and adapters. Particularly noteable about the adapters is that we have been working to build in storage flexibility from the beginning. GetPaid can thus easily be adapted for custom storage of data (especially using relational database for the store). This opens possibilities for integration with other enterprise systems, advanced reporting, and even making multiple stores per site! Check out code.google.com/p/getpaid for more on the product and its use.

The main goal of the first release is to satisfy the needs for easy donation processing in a Plone site. Content marked as a donation gets a "donate" link that takes the user through a checkout process. Any piece of content can be turned into a donation (ie event, news item, page...) and be given a price. Additional functionality is provided for "buyable" content, ie things that would be added to a shopping cart. This allows for simple stores to be easily created in the site.

Amazing Support

Where GetPaid goes from here

<geek>Eggs Don't Care!</geek> Um...sorry for that outbreak. This whole sprint community thing just gets me excited :)

At the Google sprint, we had an important revelation, inspired by Steve's (Mech422) question: line items in an order need to be workflowed independently. Take the case where you order 1 case of Empower Mint, 2 gourds, a box of Divine chocolates from our hypothetical Fair Trade store. If the mint and gourds are in stock but the chocolate isn't (maybe someone snacking in stock room!?), then we want to be able to fulfill the order that we can. So we will charge for and ship out the products we have, and leave the chocolate pending till we get more in. Since these are both part of a single order, the order itself becomes a container of line items, each of which can be workflow-ed through the system.

The result of this was that Kapil refactored much of the system (since the end of the Google sprint) to make the entire system workflow-driven. The goals is to ship a system with a workflow that can be modified for custom business processes or integrations (these changes went beyond what the hurry.workflow offered, and are also being made available upstream). This has implied updates to the admin interface as well.

Given the changing understanding of the product, we are reworking the milestones and release versions. The "Red Ochre" release, our alpha, will be out shortly and be v0.3. That will be followed by v0.6 and v0.9 (and then 1.0!). After Red Ochre is out, it will be much easier for developers and others to contribute to the product.

But when it comes down to it...the future of GetPaid largely depends on the adaptation and extension of the system by the community itself. The architecture and pending work on documentation and roadmap will provide a foundation for contributions. The sprints were important steps in building community around the product and getting new people into the code and working with the product. Already there are companies using (and modifying) GetPaid. What's next? Well, we will have to see - maybe you want to be a part of that! Visit www.plonegetpaid.com and get connected! Some things that we are looking into:

• Extensions to make the product ready for specific use cases: Premium Content, Membership organizations, pay-to-submit content, web delivery of content, and more
• Integration with other systems (Salesforce.com, accounting)
• ???