PloneSmoothGallery, by Norbert M Haigermoser, is a lightweight Plone wrapper around Jonathan Schemoul's SmoothGallery javascript photo gallery/slideshow.   It uses the Mootools javascript library to create simple, elegant, easy-to-configure slideshow view on a folder of images.

PloneSmooth Gallery with navigation drawer open

PloneSmoothGallery with navigation drawer closed

PloneSmoothGallery consists of a subclassed Folder object extended with a rich text field (love it!), a few SmoothGallery configuration options and a custom view template that includes the SmoothGallery javascript magic.  You place normal Image objects inside the PloneSmoothGallery folder.  That's nice, because if you ever decide you want to stop using SmoothGallery, you can easily move your unmodified images elsewhere.  In addition to the through-the-Plone cofiguration options, you can easily tweak the SmoothGallery CSS styles to adjust colors, layout, etc.

PloneSmoothGallery is a nice, simple, straightforward Zope2-style product.  Zope 3 aficionados (hi Rocky! ;-) would probably suggest adapting the folder object rather than subclassing it, the way p4a.audio and p4a.video do.  That's probably not a bad idea for the future, although I'm not convinced it's absolutely necessary -- this product isn't nearly as complex and ambitious as the p4a multimedia suite, so there's probably less benefit to a pure Zope 3 style approach.

There are, of course, a couple of nits to pick:

1. It would be nice to have a Smart Folder-based SmoothGallery object, so one could build photo galleries based on queries against a larger stock of photos. (Hmm, maybe Zope 3 development techniques are a good idea!)
   
   
2. Our test users found the animation of image captions distracting -- this is more of an aesthetic issue with the underlying SmoothGallery product (rather than the PloneSmoothGallery adaptation).  It would probably be easy to tweak the animation effect, though. 
   

There's one big design issue with the underlying SmoothGallery product, though.  SmoothGallery loads in all of its images as the gallery is loaded.  If you have a large gallery, or you've been careless about compressing your images, that can make the page quite heavy and use a lot of bandwidth.  There does appear to be a fix, but it hasn't been bundled into the SmoothGallery product, so you'd have to patch it yourself.  (In Plone 3, there might be some way to do this with KSS.)

Overall, though, PloneSmoothGallery looks like a great product for creating small, elegant image galleries in Plone.  It's quite a bit more polished and configurable than similar products such as PloneLightboxJS or FriendlyAlbum.

A big thanks to Norbert for packaging this up for Plone.

Many Plone users eventually take the plunge into developing their own add-on Products.  Now, there's a place to turn for help -- the new "Add-on Products Developers" list.

You can:

Subscribe and post via mail
Subscribe and post via news via Gmane. Recommended option.
Browse the archives and post via Gmane.
Search the archives via Gmane.

There's already an active conversation going, and I think this is going to be an incredibly useful resource for the fast-growing community of add-on Product developers.

This list, and all other Plone community lists, can be found at: http://plone.org/support/

I just got back from North Carolina where the Triangle Zope and Python Users Group (TriZPUG) organized a 4-day sprint in Chapel Hill, NC. The sprint brought about 40 folks together following a 4 day training (Camp5). Building on the training in Zope3/Plone3, this was a chance to apply zope3 learnings and contribute to improving Plone and its available tools.

The participants addressed a group of topics that range from bug fixing (Plone 3, syndication), new tools (Grok), and creating new application platforms for Plone (GetPaid). Typical of the intense sprint environment, there was also lots of fun! There were some impressively amusing Lightning Talks, and the BBQSprinter organizers introduced us to the concept of "Pintification". There was also our very own rock concert! We enjoyed many meals in great local restaurants, where bacon was bountiful, as well as our own bbq event. All in all, a great experience!

The organizers brought a group of sponsored sprinters to the event, which helped to create a critical mass of top talent from around the Plone/Zope universe, making it a very fertile environment for development and experimenting. Kapil really showed us how sprinting is done - he spent an evening and into the early morning coding to create a payment processing framework for Plone. The organizers also took advantage of a cool remote access system (Breeze), which enabled people around the world to watch us and the presentations.

Check out camp/sprint culture:

• Del.icio.us tags for bbq-sprint
• Del.icio.us tags for Camp5
• Flickr photo pool
  
• BBQ Sprint page, includes schedule, reports, etc
  

It's official. By vote of the Plone Foundation membership, Plone Conference 2007 will be held in Naples, Italy, and hosted by Abstract & Redomino. Date TBA, but expect sometime in late September or October.

Slashdot (!) had a link to an interesting presentation on open source business models given by Brent Williams at EclipseCon. 

There were four excellent proposals submitted to host Plone Conference 2007.

Plone Foundation members, don't forget to vote for your favorite by Wednesday, March 14, midnight GMT, by email to Paul Everritt (paul at agendaless.com)!

I'm excited to see that Richard Amerman of 7TechNW is starting to offer live online Plone training courses.

His kick-off session, A Short Plone Overview, is scheduled for April 11.  It's targeted at new Plone users and decision makers who are interested in learning more about Plone's capabilities.   At $20 for a 2-hour session, it's a bargain. 

I think this sounds like a great way to introduce folks to Plone, and I'm excited to see the Plone community starting to adopt online training.  I hope it's a successful experiment.

The idea that Plone is going to stop using Archteypes seems to be percolating out there in the wild somewhere.  As Martin definitively states: it's not true.

Hi all,

Just in the interest of avoiding confusion and doubt:

The Plone team have no immediate plans to remove Archetypes or stop maintaining it

Archetypes is alive and well. It has a new, pragmatic and reliable maintainer in Daniel Nouri. We all use it. Our customer deployments all rely on it. New documentation is being written for it. Plone's core content types are all built with Archetypes. Probably 90% of third party components are built on it as well.

It is true that there are new technologies that overlap in part with what Archetypes has covered in the past, such as better ways of making references between content or new ways of generating forms (especially when those forms are not meant to edit a content object). As Archetypes evolves, we will standardise on more such technologies and improve Archetypes' ability to interoperate with other parts of our stack. This is the way our evolution has always happened.

That does NOT mean that all your AT-based content types will suddenly stop working. So long as you keep testing your code with the version of Plone you want it to run with, and listen to deprecation warnings to pre-empt things being removed (after the standard two-version deprecation period) all will be well.

In Plone 3, Archetypes has gained a few new features that make Archetypes content types a bit more fleixble. To my knowledge, "plain" Archetypes content types should not break in Plone 3.

In other words - this is a big message about nothing. But just like the "Plone 3 will run on pure Zope 3" myth (also not true!) this one is dangerous if a number of people believe it to be true.

Regards
Martin