We’re happy to announce the release of Plone 4.3! This release includes the much-anticipated Dexterity and In-Plone Theme Editor, along with lots of other features and improvements.

“The In-Plone Theme Editor and Dexterity take us a long way toward the goal of making Plone simple to customize and theme” says Release Manager Eric Steele. “They’re a critical step in Plone’s evolution. 4.3 also includes a lot of smaller yet significant improvements -- we’ve revamped underused tools to make them more helpful, and we’ve backed out  a couple of unused and outdated features.”

What’s New in 4.3

Dexterity Content Type Framework

A recent alternative to Archetypes, Dexterity provides the ability to create new content types through the web and switch on and off behaviors on a per-type basis -- so, no more need to build add-on content-type products or “clone” content types in the ZMI. Dexterity also makes collaboration easier between integrators (who can define a type's schema, for example) and programmers (who can provide reusable behaviors as add-ons).

Developers can use Dexterity to create content types using less boilerplate and repetition than with Archetypes and CMF types. They also can create content objects with a smaller runtime footprint, thus improving performance.

Read more about Dexterity:

• Documentation

In-Plone Theme Editor

With the aim of making Plone the world’s easiest CMS to theme, the In-Plone Theme Editor uses Diazo to make it possible for designers to create themes without touching Python, Buildout, or the file system at all.

Diazo-built themes can be downloaded and distributed as Zip files, so site administrators can reuse and share them. Integrators can further enhance these thems and turn them into add-on products, if necessary.

The In-Plone Theme Editor is the product of much usability testing and collaboration with end-users. Learn more about some of the UI work that has gone into this feature.

Improved Syndication

This includes the following significant enhancements:

• Syndication now supports Atom and iTunes feed formats along with RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0.

• Syndication settings are now managed in the Plone control panel. Site integrators can...
  ...disable the search feed RSS (search_rss)
  ...select which feed types are available
  ...enable/disable syndication settings button portal action
  ...enable/disable syndication link portal action
  ...override and customize feed rendering and provide customized feeds.

• The skin layer related RSS and syndication settings is now in views.

• Feed rendering now respects the setting for "Allow anyone to view 'about' information" for the author field in a feed item so that site integrators can prevent usernames and related information from being published without customizing the template.

• More improvements to Plone’s syndication...

Updated TinyMCE

Plone now uses TinyMCE 3.4, with improved support for Internet Explorer. This version of TinyMCE features a simplified browser for links and images and is compatible with Dexterity.

Improved Content Rules User Interface

The new Content Rules UI uses overlays and AJAX to make it simpler to create and edit content rules, enable/disable rules, and apply a rule to the root of the site. Site managers also can now filter content rules.

DateTime Optimizations

Changes to the storage methods of DateTime data improve Plone’s memory footprint by 10-20%.

Page Bylines Show the Publication Date if it Exists

A small but nice feature that is useful to site visitors and content managers.

Plain-Text Searches Now Ignore Accents

This improves search results. For example, a search for econometrie should return content containing économétrie -- and now it does.

z3c.form Support to plone.app.portlets

This allows portlet forms to be built using Plone's preferred form library.

Unified Batch Implementation

This reduces the previous three batching implementations into one. This makes it easier to maintain a common user interface and improve usability. It also makes integration simpler when developing add-on products.

A New API for Password-Validation Policy

This allows easy integration of alternative password strength rules into Plone.

No Longer Shipped in Plone 4.3

• Kupu WYSIWYG editor as part of Plone core
  Those wishing to use Kupu must now explicity require Products.kupu in their buildouts.

• Kinetic Style Sheets (KSS) support
  Existing functionality has been migrated to use jQuery instead. Add-ons relying on KSS may include it by depending on plone.app.kss.

Download Plone 4.3 here.

Four fun and highly productive Plone sprints have taken place so far in 2013. If you missed participating, you still have plenty of opportunities to attend one. Better yet, make use of the available funding, and organize a sprint in your local community.

“We still have room for four large strategic sprints at $3,000 each and three small strategic sprints at $1,500 each.” says Plone Board Member Elizabeth Leddy. “Plus, we have an unlimited community sprint budget. We want to spend all of this sprint money in 2013. So people, organize small local events!”

Need some sprinting ideas? Here are the events that have taken place so far this year:

Beer and Wine Sprint

January 24-27
Cape Town, South Africa and Munich, Germany

This joint strategic sprint between South Africa and Germany involved about 30 developers. It was South Africa's first core Plone sprint.

“Connecting with sprinters on another continent brought home the point that we are a global community and that no core Plone work is done in isolation,” says Plone developer JC Brand, in Western Cape, South Africa. “South Africa is geographically isolated from the places where most Plone development takes place, so the local Plone community doesn’t get as much exposure to sprints and other events. The goal of this sprint was to help change that.”

Participants worked on the following:

• Porting CMFPlone tests from Products.PloneTestCase to plone.app.testing
• Tackling TinyMCE bugs
• Removing portal_skins from Products.CMFPlone (PLIP 13260)
• Developing tutorials
• Proofreading documentation

Read more about the Beer and Wine Sprint: opkode.com/media/blog/report-on-the-cape-town-leg-of-the-beer-wine-sprint

Emerald Sprint

February 7-11
Seattle, Washington

Participants in this strategic sprint worked on improving Dexterity. Their mission was to tackle improvements of the through-the-web content type editor as well as the capabilities of the tool for developers. Work on UI improvements included usability testing.

“It was enlightening to see people encounter the UI for the first time and try to figure it out while explaining their thoughts,” says core Plone developer David Glick. “One of the biggest take-aways for me is that while the concept of ‘behaviors’ may make sense to developers, it’s quite difficult for users to understand. We need to do more to present them in ways that make it clear what functionality they enable.”

Emerald sprinters worked on the following:

• Adjustments to the type editor based usability test findings
• Changes to make it easier to customize attributes of widgets for fields in a Dexterity schema
• A new interface for exporting content types, including a preview of the XML definition of the type’s schema -- as well as the ability to export a fully installable Python egg rather than just a GenericSetup profile
• Making it so that a new Dexterity item gets a value for its language field assigned based on the language of its container
• Adding URL and E-mail field types with built-in validation and display widgets that render links
• Migrating code from collective.dexteritytextindexer into Dexterity core. This will add a ’searchable’ toggle for each field to include it in the full text index
• A new view that can be used to export a Dexterity item represented as JSON
• Improvements to the documentation for Dexterity
• A widget for choice fields that can switch between radio buttons or a drop down depending on how many items are in the vocabulary (similar to Archetypes)
• A setting to the Overview tab for a type to configure the allowed types that may be contained within the type
• Support for changing the type restrictions for particular containers (as was already supported for Archetypes)
• Merging code to make it easier to enable versioning for Dexterity content
• Architectural changes needed to support repositioning fields that came from a behavior and moving fields to different fieldsets
• Moving all the Dexterity issues from the old Google Code tracker to issue trackers on github. New Dexterity issues should be submitted on github.

More about the Emerald Sprint:

• rpatterson.net/blog/emerald-sprint-report-out
• www.coactivate.org/projects/emerald-sprint/blog/2013/02/12/davids-summary-of-the-emerald-sprint
• www.stevemcmahon.com/steves-blog/fidgeting-widgets-at-the-emerald-sprint
• www.coactivate.org/projects/emerald-sprint/wikis/default-wiki/user-experience-summary

Barcelona Sprint

February 8-10
Barcelona, Spain

This strategic sprint focused on improving Plone's testing.

Sprinters improved the Jenkins setup so that a commit or pull request that breaks the build triggers a notification to the author. This new notification goes by the name of mr.roboto.

“Our coredev test results will finally be linked back to the commits that initiated them,” says release manager Eric Steele. “But the best part is, it will help make sure that our contribution story has a low barrier to entry for potential contributors. It also allows the community to make quick, informed decisions about merging new code. And it does so in a way that won’t sacrifice build quality.”

Barcelona sprinters also worked on getting more Robot Framework (RF) tests into Plone. Because RF fires up a real browser in which Javascript works, it allows developers to test overlays, folder reordering, and the like.

The sprinters also wrote documentation to accompany RF tests and modified the template for creating new Plone products so that the boilerplate is already present.

More about the Barcelona Sprint:

• keeshink.blogspot.com/2013/02/my-barcelona-testing-sprint.html
• plone.293351.n2.nabble.com/Introducing-mr-roboto-td7563163.html

ArtSPrinT

February 18-22
Vienna, Austria

This community sprint was open to anyone interested in collaborating on Zope, Plone, Python, or related projects. Sprinters were invited to propose and organize around their own topics, so it was quite an interesting mix.

Participants worked on the following:

• plone.app.event, a calendaring implementation for Plone
• plone.app.toolbar, which generates a toolbar at the top of each content item view, and plone.app.deco, a drag-and-drop layout composition system for Plone
• Writing AGX code generators for Pyramid, Cornice, and YAFOWIL, including tests and GoParser integration. AGX is a code-generation framework used for transforming UML models into Python code (although it is the successor of ArchGenXML, it bears little resemblance). See this YouTube demo of AGX generating a self-contained buildout with Plone Dexterity content types.
• Extending the Pyramid Google App Engine tutorial at https://github.com/jensens/pyramid-gae-tutorial
• Evaluating possible tools for resource management (JavaScript, CSS, and related binary assets)

More about the ArtSPrinT:

• www.coactivate.org/projects/artsprint2013/blog
• plone.org/events/community/artsprint-a-2013

Read the full announcement in romanian on the plone.ro website.

The symposium, running from June 2-9, 2013, will offer two full days of talks, as well as training options prior to the event and several days of sprints following the symposium.

Also on tap will be three keynotes addresses, featuring journalist Grace Lim, leadership coach Dr. Curtis Odom, and internationally-known Plone consultant and Plone Foundation board member Elizabeth Leddy.

The deadline for earlybird registration is April 2nd and is rapidly approaching.  Have you registered?  If not, visit the registration site now and guarantee yourself seats at what will be an outstanding Plone event in North America.

The Symposium will be held at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh - which is the third largest campus in the University of Wisconsin System, with over 13,000 full time undergraduate students and almost 1,500 faculty and staff.  As one of the drivers of the regional economy, UW Oshkosh is an internationally renowned showcase of innovation.

You can find out all about the symposium at their website. We hope you will make plans to attend.

Philip Bauer is with Starzel.de, and works on creating web and intranet sites small and large. With the Munich Plone group, Philip organized the very successful first German Plone-Konferenz in February 2012 in Munich. He's also an associate chair of the Python Software Verband e.V. Philip, has helped run German Plone website, Plone.de, and has organized sprints focusing on marketing Plone.

The Plone Foundation is the conservator for the Plone Content Management System, and promotes Plone, its community and its development. The Foundation currently has over 100 members, all chosen for their significant and enduring contributions to Plone. Foundation membership applications are considered by the Foundation's Membership Committee and approved by its Board of Directors.

Plone is an open-source web content management system that excels in security, scalability, internationalization, usability and flexibility. The project has hundreds of active developers, spread throughout the world.

This is the first time the Conference will take place in the southern part of the globe, and we're very happy about that. Plone is gaining a lot of traction here already, and the Conference will make it blast. We want you here. So, really, start organizing your trip!

Here's the website. Along with the official schedule, you will find information about the city of Brasília, the Conference's venue. Travel details, tourism information and information about restaurants are also available on the site. We will expand this information as time goes on.

Did we mention we've already confirmed two keynotes?

The website's design was done by our fellow Plonista André Nogueira. We really like it; hope you do too! By the way, it's done with Diazo, it's responsive, and you're invited to contribute. Send improvements and bug fixes to https://github.com/plonegovbr/beyondskins.ploneconf.site/.

We will soon be publishing new sections of the website, such as Registration and Sponsorship, so check back often or just follow us on Twitter or Facebook. We will be more than happy to be contacted through social media or the official e-mail info@ploneconf.org.

Finally, following the tradition, we'd like to inform you that the previous PloneConf website has been moved to http://2012.ploneconf.org. Thank you, Four Digits, you did a shiny and wonderful job. We hope that we can be on a par with it.

It is aimed at everyone in the Python community, of all skill levels, both users and programmers. The growing importance of EuroPython deserves Plone developers' attention, to replicate and improve last year's effort to promote Plone to the Python community: we encourage every Plonista attending EuroPython in June 2013 to submit a talk describing his/her work to an audience of developers from around Europe and the world.

The deadline for proposals is March 5th, and you can find out more by visiting the Call for Proposals page on the EuroPython 2013 website. From their proposals page:

We're looking for proposals on every aspect of Python: programming from novice to advanced levels, applications and frameworks, or how you have been involved in introducing Python into your organisation.

First-time speakers are especially welcome; EuroPython is a community conference and we are eager to hear about your experience. We are organizing a special review and rehearsal process for them, to help them get started for their first talk. If you have friends or colleagues who have something valuable to contribute, twist their arms to tell us about it!

Please also forward this Call for Proposals to anyone that you feel may be interested.

In 2012 people had a lot of fun, don't miss it.

I’ve mostly contributed quality-assurance stuff, as well as ideas and proofs-of-concepts. I got started by creating package translations— it was what I felt comfortable contributing in the beginning.

I do think it’s important to give something back early on— not just start asking for help with your hands empty. Contributing package translations  was my way of saying, “I need your help and, in exchange, I can do this.”

I understand you left the Plone community for a while and then came back. What were you doing during that time? What brought you back?

I left La Jornada in 2008 to work at a company that offered proprietary solutions for newspapers. I learned a lot, but that model was not for me. While I was there, I was always talking about the benefits of the open source business model. They laughed at me. I was the weird guy.

I left there to start my own business in 2010, and I’m infinitely more satisfied. For me, it’s much more rewarding knowing someone is using or contributing to an open source project I'm working on than getting a sales commission.

The other day, I visited my old employer's web page and I saw that they’ve started using open source too.

What do you focus on in your business?

I share my time between Simples Consultoria, the best known name in Plone in Brazil, and Open Multimedia, a Mexican start-up that offers solutions for news companies. I mostly do project management and quality assurance work, but I also think about new features we can offer to our customers.

I've been involved in deploying news sites in Venezuela but also some intranets and government sites in Brazil.

Any messages you want to share with the Plone community?

I want to invite everybody to the next Plone conference, in Brasilia. I know the people coordinating it, and I know it’s going to be the best Plone conference ever.

And finally, what are your future plans in the community?

Share and Enjoy.

Come join other Plone developers at the Beer and Wine Sprint, the first sprint in 2013. This will be a dual event in Germany and South Africa. For more information, see plone.org/events/community/beer-and-wine-sprint.

Interested in hosting a sprint? Submit an event request after reading the event sponsorship policy at plone.org/foundation/event-sponsorship/plone-event-sponsorship-policy.

Plone community members will have lots of opportunities to host and participate in sprints during the coming year. Funding is available for the following:

• Four major sprints. Funding: $3,000 each. Topic must be coordinated.
• Six strategic sprints. Funding: $1,500 each. Topic must be coordinated. If you would like to host a strategic sprint, a Plone team leader will help coordinate the event.
• 15 community sprints. Funding: $300 each. Funding for community sprints is on a first-come, first-served basis, and generally pays for refreshments.

Sprint funding can pay for housing and/or food to facilitate bringing together a group of people in one place, such as with the Cioppino Sprint.

It also can be used for a portion of the airfare for individuals, based on team-leader recommendations. In this case, we encourage the sprinter to pay 50 percent, or at least some portion, of the fare. “Up-and-coming participants as well as established members of the community should have this funding opportunity,” says Plone Board member Elizabeth Leddy. “We prefer sending established Plone people to new sprints and new Plone people to established sprints.”

Those interested in hosting a sprint will find the event sponsorship policy and event-request form at plone.org/foundation/event-sponsorship/plone-event-sponsorship-policy. When filling out an event request, you also can ask for Plone swag to give out to participants. This swag is available to sprint hosts at no cost.

“We want to get lots more people involved in sprinting,” says Leddy.  “It enhances Plone for everyone. It builds our community. And it’s a great learning experience for beginners.”

The Board for 2012/2013 consists of members from 4 countries on 3 continents, but increasing the geographical diversity is one of our main goals for this year. Over the past months, a group of people have been contacted who will advise the Board further. They have agreed to work as 'ambassadors' for their regional communities, advise on how the Foundation can better support Plone all over the world, and in general help the spread of Plone and the Plone community.

The Advisory Members are:

• Leonardo Caballero, Venezuela
• Virginia Choy, Australia
• Roché Compaan, South Africa
• Alexander Loechel, Germany
• Balázs Reé, Hungary
• Manubu Terada, Japan.
• Suresh V., India

You can find more information on them here

Together with this eminent group of people, we aim to serve the needs of Plone users, developers, integrators, documenters and translators worldwide better.

As a board, we are very pleased these advisors have agreed to lend us their time, knowledge and insights to improve Plone's global appeal; we look forward to working together.

Paul Roeland
President, Plone Foundation

Shortly, here's how it will work:

• Free Admission! (but you should register anyway..)
• Scheduled talks in the morning (please, send your proposals to plog@abstract.it!)
• Open space in the afternoon, developing topics introduced in the morning
• Sprint: you bring energy and topics: the PLOG never stops! (please, send your sprint topic to plog@abstract.it!)

Want to know more?

Go to the PLOG site now!