Plone Cathedral sprint after-action report
A small delegation from Jarn, Denys Mishunov, our German freelancers Tom Lazar and Andreas Zeidler, and myself, participated in the Cathedral Sprint in Cologne, Germany, March 15-19 2010, generously sponsored and hosted by GfU Cyrus AG. We had a great time, a week with awesome Plone people, great mindshare, wonderful productivity and German hospitality, food and beer.
The sprint focused on features and finishing for the upcoming Plone 4 and 4.1 releases and saw incredible results in the 5 days of hard work from 25 sprinters.
Photo © Armin Carl Stroß-Radschinski.
Here are some highlights based on Armin Carl Stroß-Radschinski's sprint summary in German, generously translated to English by Matthew Wilkes and crippled for brevity by me. Read the original summary (english) for more details here.
Results
I have tried listing some of the achievements from the sprint — beyond getting to spend time with the best Open Source community on the planet. I apologize for any names or features i have missed (and i'll be happy to take corrections).
Reimplementation of Plone collections
Eric Steele, Matthew Wilkes, Roel Bruggink, Maarten Kling, Ralph Jacobs , Rob Gietema, Martijn Jacobs and Geir Bækholt
Collections in Plone are saved searches with complex criteria whose results are shown with a given ordering. The improvements to the interface of these 'smart folders', which will also apply to searches, has made their usage significantly more intuitive.
The interface for entering search criteria shows search results in live time as the query is edited, in the same way as the Live-Search feature does for simple searches in Plone 3. More criteria can be added step-by-step to narrow the search even further. The results are updated real-time for instant user feedback.
Search improvements
Denys Mishunov, Israel Saeta Pérez, Nejc Zupan
Great improvements to search results display, and a new, improved advanced search form with instant Ajax gratification.
Event upgrades
Andreas Jung, Vincent Fretin, Johannes Raggam, Tom Gross and Rodrigo Ristow
Further improvements to the plone calendaring system, incorporating features like new (i18n) widget, full-day-events, recurring events, iCal export and more.
Content Browsing
Robert Niederreither
A new Java-Script based interface for fast and efficient navigation of the content structure of a site. The view, based on the split-pane view of MacOSX's finder is, through direct queries to the Plone catalogue, extremely fast compared to the conventional method of loading each new page in turn, and is displayed using a CSS overlay.
The new interface can be called up from any page in the site - you immediately get an overview of the viewed content's context.
German article from Jan
Ulrich Hasecke
New content migration strategy for Plone 4
Tom Lazar and Carsten Senger
A combination of Plone 3 and Plone 4 extensions that use the content migration pipelines from Transmogrifier. With this the content of an existing site can be exported in a Plone-version agnostic form and then reconstructed in a fresh Plone 4 instance.
Translations
Jan Ulrich Hasecke, Martijn Schenk
German and Dutch Translations for Plone 4
Plone Discussions
Timo Stollenwerk and Florian Friesdorf
The new commenting engine for Plone, with moderation and other useful improvements.
Performance / image scales
Andreas Zeidler,Simon Pamies
Performance improvements including handling of image data and a complete revamp of image scales.
For more info on the sprint, Jan Ulrich Hasecke has also written a good personal summary of events while Armin Carl Stroß-Radshinski has posted a lot of photos from the sprint on Flickr.
--Geir Bækholt
Photo © Armin Carl Stroß-Radschinski.