Journal of the second day

Journal of the second day of the sprint

Second day is over and now it is allready the beginning of the third and last sprint-day. Like I predicted, second day was much interesting than the first one - since after the slow starts people got to do some real work. And at the end of the day there were some good progressreports - showing impressive new things. During the sprint I've talked with a lot of people and learned insane amount of information about what people are doing. I think it is easily agreeable what Paul Everitt said in Plone 1.0 release celebration - Open Source software is about people. Without this active community there would not be such a powerfull movement behind Plone and making sure that things happen.

Last day - by the way - we made some cool records in bandwidth usage for the videos. So big thanks to Bluedynamics for providing us with the space where we serve the videos from. If you are able to cache videos somewhere, please do so. And if you are interested on getting the videon on better quality - I can capture 'em again and possibly burn to cd-roms or similar. This quality we use now is the absolute minimum we can and should use.

And please send feedback, either by email or in irc - if you have found these reports / pictures and videos usefull. We have atleast had fun doing these, but it does require some time to keep everyone updated about the progress. The following presentations were made at the end of the second day - and are also available on video today from:

http://movies.bluedynamics.org/trips/plone_berne/

Alexander Limi, Groups in Plone / Plone future

Alexander did a presentation of one implementation of groups in Plone. The product itself is not yet released, but should be released later on to open source by Ingeniweb. I talked in Paris with Kamon Ayeva about their implementation and liked the idea, and liked it even more now that I actually saw it demonstrated by Limi. What is nice with Ingeniweb's implementation is that it does not break anything - or require additional support from products to make groups work.

Alexander's roadmap was also a good read, available on plone.org.

Vincenzo Di Somma - Francesco Ciriaci , Reflow progress

Reflow is getting closer to be packaged and ready to be installed on any Plone instance around the world. Hopefully the third day will bring in good news from this front, especially in the form of a release. Reflow is becoming an insanely cool workflow engine that in the best case can help you to develope your complex applications even faster than before.

Simon Eisenman, OpenOffice integration - i18n content object

Simon Eisenman showed two different products. First one was OODocument, which allows you to use Openoffice documents in Plone and edit them in OO with ExternalEditor. What is cool in the implementation is that it is easier to set up than the way of using OpenOffice to do the transformation from Word to html. Reason for this is that the OODocument does the conversion by xml and xslt, so it does not need OpenOffice on the serverside.

Another cool product was a content-object for i18n content like images. In a folderish object you could store different images for different languages and the language negotiation mechanism takes care of showing the image in correct language. There is still work needed to be done, for example to make it work well with localizer etc. But I think there are people who will find this usefull allready as it is.

Alan's work-report

Alan has done some cleaning up, which is allways usefull. Portal-forms handling is finally recognized as insanely complex and something that requires quite a lot of Zen to be understood. Great hope goes into documentation work - the possibility that someday someone understands everything really well, and during that moment of absolute clarity writes it down. In a comprehencible format too.

Alan and Limi were both heavily used by every team. They have proven to be excellent sources for information and also amazingly good in keeping their temper, even when people start to ask the same questions for the 100 th time.

Plone reporting tool, Ulrich Eck

Ulrich Eck, our friendly hacker from Munich, had some really crazy development to show. He had created a totally new tool into Plone that actually wraps Reportlab into a tool that can be used to create PDF with templates from any structured text content. So, you could have a 'make pdf' tab on all the content objects that are worth while to be got as PDF and use this tool to automaticly create the files on the fly. Amazingly cool stuff - once again.

Documentation progress

The whole documentation had the possibility to say a word or two. Progress was really visible, but the real work is yet to be done. It is allways really nice to start doing documentation, but the hard part is maintaining it and writing it to a level that is good enough for the target audience. Really positive thing about the documentation progress is that people are doing work on different ends. There are guys doing reference installations for Apache etc. , there are guys doing newbie documentation and ofcourse there is the work being done on documenting different API's.

Maik also has documented quite nicely their work-progress in his own blog, Uzopia - which you propably should check out from time to time.

Business talks, Plone.net

I have had the priviledge to work with very intelligent people during this sprint and contribute in the thinking of how Zope companies could work together to server our customers better, and even compete for larger projects as a network in the future. We've done some really creative thinking and talking about how to develope the marketing messages and how to sell Plone - and are now on our way into creating the framework and first actions on plone marketing.

I won't go into detail, but it is cool stuff.