Wow, it's been a while since I've sent a message out to the greater Plone community.  I've been a bit busy over the last few months, what with having a new baby, and with internal-facing improvements to the OpenPlans software.

In the last weeks, though, I've been able to get around to some long-lingering needs which may be of interest to all of you.  Specifically, I've been getting the OpenPlans software to work on Plone 3.0, and I've put some finishing touches on the OpenPlans installation process, so that it's now much much easier for someone who wants to play around with a full OpenPlans stack to get started.  (OpenPlans, for those of you who don't know, is the largely-but-not-exclusively Plone-based software that powers the collaborative community website openplans.org, among others.)

The Plone 3 support is still experimental; it's not deployed on any of our live sites, and it hasn't yet seen any extensive testing.  It installs and works, however, and all of our unit and functional test suites pass.  And not only do they pass... they run much more quickly.  The zopectl tests are about 2.5 times faster (yes, that's 250%!) than they were before.  The flunc tests, which emulate a browser and connect to a running site over HTTP, don't see that much of an improvement, but they are consistently 20-25% faster than they are against a Plone 2.5-based stack.  Much (but far from all) of the improvement comes from Helge's refactoring of Membrane's object_implements index implementation; if you run a Remember or Membrane based site and you haven't played around with that code, I strongly recommend you do.  In any event, once we get this merged back to the trunk and installed on the openplans.org site, I'm confident there will be a very noticeable performance improvement for our users.

Equally exciting to me is that we now have some nice tools in place for people to get their own local copies of OpenPlans working.  It's taken us three iterations, but we've finally got a set of build tools and a build process dialed in that is working for us in managing both our development and production deployment environments.  And we've put some thin wrappers around this to make it easy for you to get started.  You can learn more at our getting started page.  If you're REALLY impatient you can eyeball the steps you'll have to take to get things going in the quick start section, although you'll probably also want to look at what you will need since OpenPlans does require that some other tools and services be available on your server before you can start the build.

Those of us at TOPP have had a great time building this; we hope that you find it valuable, and that you have as much fun using it, either hosted by us on openplans.org or as your own installation elsewhere.