Plone Conference 2018 at Tokyo -report, part 1: Battle-hardened, future-proof, driven by extraordinary people!

My first ever trip to Tokyo couldn't have been better: fast trains coming and going as scheduled, tasty fresh delicacies available in every corner, helpful Japanese people welcoming the visitors. And most importantly, Plone Conference 2018 was as exciting, interesting and inspirational as ever - enjoyed together with possibly the most friendly open source community in the world!

Here is a short summary of some of the things that caught my divided attention. Lots of interesting tracks at the same time, but luckily all conferenece presentations and lightning talks will be published later in YouTube and Slideshare (and another blog post).

During the conference I attended the trainings, held an impromptu demonstration of a new tool we created at University of Jyväskylä, gave my conference presentation and even gave a lightning talk, in addition to attending the talks.

Oh, and Plone is an enterprise level open source content management system, widely used e.g. at JYU for websites, intranet portals, workflow solutions and customized web applications.

A view from the hotel room.

Trainings 5.-6.11.2018

Monday 5.11.2018

My trip to Tokyo from Jyväskylä took about 24 hours, so after leaving on sunday morning 10 am and arriving at the conference venue at 1 pm next day, I was pretty exhausted :) I decided to try to attend the trainings, staying shortly at Mastering Plone -course and ending up to Hacking Plone course for the rest of the afternoon.

The discussion in the hacking class turned to mastering various Plone features, like building custom Dexterity content types and enhancing those with different workflows. As it happens, my presentation was about workflows, Dexterity types and a new tool called collective.flow, so I was encouraged to give an impromptu demonstration of the tool in hand. Thanks to my colleague Asko Soukka (https://twitter.com/datakurre), I had a working demo environment to play with.

Collective.flow is a Plone add-on, that enables content editors to easily create customizable, form based content types and attach different workflows to them. For example you can create a form that saves information as a new document, that can be handled by a review workflow. In addition, that form can be easily modified to have slightly different schema for different needs, for example in two departments at a university.

It might not have been the most coherent demonstration ever, considering the traveling and jetlag, but I had fun, and people seemed to get what I was telling to them :)

After the training day I retreated to my hotel room to get some sleep and to make final preparations for my presentation. The conference venue was near Keikyu Kamata station at Ota financial district. The area was not so densely populated, and had couple of nice shopping streets with lots of small restaurants. 

Tuesday 6.11.2018

On tuesday, refreshed after a good night's sleep, I attended Plone React (Volto) training.

Volto is React-based front-end for the Plone and Guillotina Content Management Systems.

https://github.com/plone/volto

Though I'm not much of a developer, or hardly touched terminal window or code editors, I managed to get a Plone 5 -site running on the backend and Volto on the frontend, thanks to pretty detailed documentation: https://training.plone.org/5/volto/index.html. Nice!

Everything you need

Maybe the main point with React and Plone is that you can use a robust, secure, full-featured cms with granular permission management and loads of other features as a backend, but still build the frontend using some fancy JavaScript library like React. The communication is done via plone.restapi, a RESTful hypermedia API for Plone: https://github.com/plone/plone.restapi.

Compared to building an application from the scratch, using CMS backend is a huge bonus.

Volto looks really slick, the UI (pastanaga.ui) is clear and super fast - its having the Plone features but the UX is totally new.

Some examples of a real world Volto use cases include a flexible learning management system in Germany: https://vhs-ehrenamtsportal.de/ and beautiful and fast bakery site https://www.zeelandia.com/. Other use cases might be modern progressive web apps (PWA) in addition to any web-based service. 

Conference 7.-9.11.2018

Plone conference main event days usually consist of presentations, open spaces and 5 minute lightning talks from 9.30 to 18.30. https://2018.ploneconf.org/.

In addition to Plone stuff, the conference had 3 additional tracks: Python Web Day track, DB Day track and Frontend Day track - all nicely contributing to one another.

Wednesday 7.11.2018

The conference talks were opened once again by a "State of Plone" presentation by Plone release manager Eric Steele. The main points from his presentation (in addition to being funny and inspiring):

• Zope (the system behind Plone) has been successfully ported to Python 3 https://zope.readthedocs.io/en/latest/WHATSNEW.html 
• Python 3 support is done for Plone
• Plone 5.2 alpha to be released during conference
• Plone.restapi and all the possibilities with combining Plone as backend and JS as frontend
• Guillotina and Volto 
• Community

Then came my turn. 

Workflows and Plone
 - Case supervisiondoc 

 

Workflows and Plone
 - Case supervisiondoc from Rikupekka Oksanen

I told the audience how we searched for a multi-functional workflow solution and ended up using Plone as a workflow engine and form builder in different cases, like the Supervisiondoc for all the postgraduate students and their supervisors. For this, we have developed Plone add on called collective.flow, which enables us to flexibly create form based workflow solutions.

My colleague Asko Soukka (https://github.com/datakurre), in addition to creating the add on and building the system, provided me with detailed slides for this presentation about collective.flow. 

The actual service I was talking about was a success - it servers users well, has more features than originally intended and was released in time. After releasing it, more than 600 documents were created to the system in short time, with little to none technical problems or need to more documentation or support.

https://www.jyu.fi/supervisiondoc/

Currently we are using collective.flow in other cases too: different invoice forms, feedback system and many more in the future.

Conference days 7.-9.11.2018 - the rest

There were many interesting presentations, which I will go through on another post when the videos arrive!

Sprint 10.-11.11.2018

Sadly, I couldn't stay for one of the most important events from the perspective of the community: the sprint. During the last two days, people gather at the same location to develop things further, to create documentation, to test features, to contribute to the Plone community in anyway they can, together. 

Based on github activity, the sprint was yet again really active and successful one.

https://github.com/plone/

More sprints are coming, feel free to join for example the legendary Alpine City Sprint at Austria in February: https://plone.org/events/sprints/alpine-city-sprint-2019-in-innsbruck-austria!

Domo arigato!

The conference was professionally organized by our Japanese hosts. Everything worked as planned, yet the atmosphere was relaxed and easy-going. Thank you Manabu Terada and crew!

Battle hardened, future proof, driven by extraordinary people

Plone has been around for almost 18 years. That kind of life span is impressive for any software, especially for an open source one that is driven by dedicated people during their spare time. Not all conference goers or sprint attendees use Plone actively, but they keep contributing.

So what keeps people investing in Plone? The answer might be (in addition to solving interesting tech problems) in the community: professional, passionate, welcoming and friendly!

By the way, the next Plone Conference will be held in Ferrara Italy at October 2019 so save the date!
https://plone.org/news/2018/plone-conference-2019-will-be-in-ferrara-italy

The future of Plone looks lively: Plone and Zope has been ported to Python 3, there is robust and feature rich Plone 5.2 in the works and interestingly, using Plone as a backend for modern JavaScript based custom applications might be a big step towards something new. From enterprise-level custom workflow applications to fast PWA mobile apps, anything is possible!



Stay tuned for the second part of my Ploneconf 2018 blog post!

RoboCon 2018 and Robot Framework Jupyter support

It's already over a week since I got back home from the first Robot Framework conference ever – RoboCon 2018. It was a pleasure to be there, and I really feel privileged that I was accepted there as a speaker.

My RoboCon 2018

RoboCon 2018 was a single day conference about Robot Framework test automation ecosystem, held in the heart of Helsinki, Finland, on 18th of January 2018. The conference venue was quite if not completely full, so there must have been around 250 participants. The event was in English and had pretty good international participation. Yet, most of the participants came from Finland, where Robot Framework has become de-facto standard for test automation.

Pekka Klärck presenting the history, present and future of Robot Framework

RoboCon 2018 had only a single track, so that had to be packed to include something for everyone in its diverse audience. In addition, there was plenty of time and a separate space for networking with the other participants and conference sponsors. There was also organized social program before and after the conference, but unfortunately, I was unable to attend those at this time.

In my opinion the program was well balanced: The conference started with introductory talks, continued with variety of differnet case studies (Kone, Plone and Texas Instruments), and ended with more technical talks about specific Robot Framework addons (SeleniumLibrary, the most awesome new REST library and pabot). And in the middle of everything, there was my personal favorite: Ed Manlove's talk about building successful open source communities. My presentation was called Robot Framework in Plone CMS Project: a case study, story and some technical details, how Robot Framework got successfully adopted in distributed open source community behind Plone.

The most important part of this conference, of course, was getting a lot of Robot Framework users and developers to meet in the same place at the same time. After all, RoboCon 2018 was the first Robot Framework conference ever. My personal absolute highlight during the conference was meeting a former Plonista, Ed Manlove. He was the one who first introduced me to Selenium testing in San Francisco Plone Conference in 2011, and whom I had not seen after that. Until now. I really hope takes less than seven yeras to see him again...

Ed Manlove presenting his talk: The Importance of Open Source Communities

Jupyter kernel for Robot Framework

After the conference on Thursday came the single day conference sprint on Friday. And if the conference was a success, the sprint was even more so: the sprint venue, three large office rooms, was packed full of sprinters, many of them participating their first open source sprint (and got a good introduction to open source development from Ed).

The sprint facilities were provided by Eficode

Because I had to leave early in Friday, I had planned a very specific sprint goal for myself: a MVP Robot Framework kernel for Jupyter notebook.

Jupyter notebook (previously known as IPython notebook) is an open-source web application for creating and sharing documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. The architecture behind Jupyter notebook separates the notebook application from its language specific ”kernels” that are responsible for executing the code in notebooks. Syntax highlighting in notebooks, on the other hand, is provided by CodeMirror project for the interactive frontend, and Pygments for server side generated highlighting.

I'm happy to say that I made it. And the more I use it, the more confident I get on that Jupyter makes a great platform for learning also Robot Framework. And not only for learning by yourself, but also for sharing your notes with others.

Check my example notebooks to judge the kernel by yourself.

Please, note that while these examples are static renderings at http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/, they can be opened and interacted live in any running Jupyter notebook with the new kernel and required Python packages. See the repository for more details.

The main Jupyter Robot Framework support features shown in those examples are:

• Support for defining and executing Robot Framework test suite cumulatively step by step in successive notebook cells. The main limitation is that each cell should start with a test suite section header (settings, variables, keywords or test suites) even when the same header was already defined in some cell before.
• HTML log and report files are linked below the executed cells containing the tests. Both files are actually bundled with the notebook in a way that sharing the notebook also shares the log and report files.
• Images generated during test execution are shown below the executed cells generating the images. Similarly to HTML logs and reports also images are bundled with the notebook for sharing.
• Support for %%python module LibaryName ”cell magic” to allow defining custom Robot Framework keyword libraries in Python in fly. Once thell cell with a Python library class definition is executed, it can be imported in a successive Robot Framework code cell.
• Syntax highlighting. But, unfortunately, until the CodeMirror plugin derived from brackets-robotframework-project is accepted into upstream, it must be manually patched into CodeMirror version shipped with Jupyter notebook-distribution. (I have not yet submitted a pull for it.)
• If the last keyword of the last test case in the executed cell returns JSON string, it is rendered as cell execution output. I added this quite specific feature to make it more fun to learn RESTinstance library with Jupyter (Output keyword of RESTinstance library returns JSON).

Obviously, while the current versions is already fully functional on Python 3, there's still a lot of work (QA, packaging and Python 2 support) left to polish the code for release. I'm looking forward to finish it during the spring.

Happy hacking! And hopefully see you in RoboCon next year – or whenever it is organized and I'll manage to participate it for the next time! :)

Plone Conference Barcelona 2017

It was awesome to be back at Plone Conference this year. Finally! We have had participation in Plone conferences in 2009, 2011–2012 and 2014–2017, but for me the previous one was years ago: Plone Conference Bristol in 2014. Needless to say that I have missed the warm and welcoming atmosphere of a Plone conferences, and It's my pleasure to report that Barcelona did not let me down. Even the weather was still warm there in this October.

This year there was no single big Plone news at the conference. The latest major release of Plone CMS was released already two years ago, and the next feature release is still waiting for its gold master. Yet, there was still a lot of good news, and putting all the puzzle pieces together resulted in a clear picture of the future of Plone.

Disclaimer: These are obviously just my personal opinions on all these things Plone...

Plone Conference Barcelona was so much of fun that I took a piece of it with me back home.

Plone 2020 and beyond

At first, let's say it clear that Plone CMS remains to be a safe bet for a long-term enterprise CMS solution. If there ever was any doubt, whether Plone could make it to Python 3 in-time before the end of Python 2.7 maintenance in 2020, that should be no more. Plone will make it.

All the major blockers seem to have been solved, and the rest is just hard work left for our community (check some related talks by Alexander and Hanno about the recent events on that). Python 3 version of Zope application server powering Plone is already in beta, and it is scheduled to be released within a year. Plone, for sure, has still plenty of packages to be ported from Python 2.7 to Python 3, but there are already many sprints scheduled to continue that work in near future (including the already completed Barcelona Conference sprints). We might even have an alpha version of Plone on Python 3 before end of 2018.

In addition that, it's always good to mention, that Plone Foundation has continued to do its usual great job in all the possible paper work around managing Plone's copyrights and trademarks.

All these should be good and relaxing news for any long-term Plone user.

Let's go frontend!

The greatest challenge for Plone CMS seems to be keeping up with the ever increasing UX expections of the day, while complying with the high accessibility standards. After Plone 5 rewrote the default theme and whole front-end resource management in Plone, there are no longer blockers for using any current front-end tech with Plone. But just being able to use some tech is not enough – also the real work for better UX needs to be done. And even a lot has been done for Plone 5 and 5.1, that work seems to never end.

Plone Conference Barcelona included a great amount of front-end, user experience and accessibility related talks to educate our community. So many that I can only mention a few.

At first, there were talks regarding the current Plone user interface: Johannes gave a bit technical, but very comprehensive talk how the new frontend resource registries in Plone 5 really work. My talk instructed, how to combine the ancient powers of Zope application server with the modern Plone 5 theming support to achieve shorter iterations and faster deployments when developing new UX features. Our Rikupekka talked about our migration experiences from Plone 4 to Plone 5, and gave a demo about of the UI features we have developed using the approach I discussed in my talk. Finally, I want to mention Wildcards' Kim's talk about Castle CMS, which really showcased, how much difference well lead and focused UX development for Plone based distribution could do in just about a year. Although, the fact that Castle's development had to be forked a bit from the main Plone distribution is also telling, how difficult it is to make the same UX please everyone.

Then there were many talks about the future: there's a new branch of Plone user interfaces built completely in JavaScript on top of the great Plone REST API (which Timo gave a nice presentation about). With Plone REST API it's possible to combine the great and robust CMS features of our secure Plone backend with leading edge JavaScript based frontend. It also makes Plone based solutions feasible for the current generation of frontend developers, because only very basic Plone knowledge is needed to get started. And while there is no complete replacement of Plone user interface in JavaScript yet, there are SDK like projects with many familiar UI components already for ReactJS, Angular (check Eric's talk) and even on VueJS.

If these don't feel ambitious enough, there was one more thing: Albert's talk about Pastanaga UI – a proposal for next generation UI for generic CMSs.

Guillotina – server for a more civilized age

I'm not sure how common mistake it is, but at least we have sometimes ended up using Plone as a framework for projects, for which Plone was not really the most optimal solution. That has happened, because Plone has some very unique features we love and trust: object database with URL traversal, extremely flexible Zope Component Architecture, and very proven security model especially designed for hierarchical data.

At Barcelona conference, Nathan from Onna presented their new ”AsyncIO REST Resource Application Server” called Guillotina (open sourced through Plone Foundation)r What makes Guillotina very special and interesting is that it has all those unique features we have learned to love in Plone ”framework”, but with minimal server footprint and first class support for asynchronous programming using Python 3 AsyncIO event loop. That should allow Guillotina to go places where no Plone has gone before.

I really hope the next year brings us a suitable project to try Guillotina in practice...

There and back again

To summarize all this, here's my picture of the future of Plone on the base of Plone Conference Barcelona 2017 in three sentences:

• Plone CMS as we know it remains here to stay – the current users remain safe with Plone
• Plone REST API and all the UI SDKs based on it ”save Plone” by making it a feasible solution for content management related progressive web apps
• Guillotina ”saves Plone developers” by allowing them to transfer their current Plone ”framework” knowledge into era of high-performance Python 3 AsyncIO microservices.

Obviously there was a lot more in the conference than this. There was a lot of great talks by talented speakers. It was great to see all the old friends and make some new ones. I had a chance to meet my GSOC 2017 student Oshane Bailey. And there are no parties like parties in Plone Conferences.

Thanks once again for all the organizers. It was a pleasure to be there.

We'll see if I get to see Tokyo next year...

Photo of me, Oshane Bailey and David Bain by Maik Derstappen. They said this pose is to honor Usain Bolt.

Midsummer Sprint Final Report

Plone Midsummer Sprint was held at Jyväskylä, Finland, on 3rd–7th of July 2017. The main goal for the sprint was to polish content editors' user experience on the current Plone CMS release. While a lot was accomplished for that original goal, the final sprint topics adapted to follow the interests of its volunteering participants.

The sprint was sponsored by the University of Jyväskylä. In addition, the sprint was accepted to receive strategic funding from Plone Foundation to cover the possible travel and accommodation costs of Albert Casado, the designer of Plone 5 user interface.

This is the final report of Midsummer Sprint.

Participants

There was 18 participants at Midsummer Sprint in total. The participants included, of course, our organisers, our local development team for Plone based and related services, a GSOC student working on a Plone Foundation mentored topic, a professional UX designer and many well known names from Plone community.

Our sprint organisers:

• Asko Soukka, University of Jyväskylä
• Rikupekka Oksanen, University of Jyväskylä

Our local development team:

• Jussi Rajala, University of Jyväskylä
• Jussi Talaskivi, University of Jyväskylä
• Matti Pohjanvirta, University of Jyväskylä
• Valtteri Karppinen, University of Jyväskylä

Google Summer of Code student:

• Mikko Hursti, University of Jyväskylä

Plone community participants:

• Albert Casado, Hewlett Packard
• Alexander Loechel, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
• Eric Steele
• Maik Derstappen, Derico
• Paul Roeland, Clean Clothes Campaign
• Peter Holzer, agitator Weblösungen
• Philip Bauer, Starzel.de
• Stephan Klinger, der Freitag
• Sven Strack
• Timo Stollenwerk, kitconcept GmbH
• Victor Fernández de Alba, kitconcept GmbH

Thank you for all the participants! Many of you came to Jyväskylä with members of your family, and it was our pleasure to host every one of you!

Results

According to the feedback that we got from our participants, the sprint was considered a very successful one. Maybe the sprint was unable to fix as many content editing related issues as we were hoping for, but it definitely managed to get the best out of its participants:

At first, thanks to this sprint, all members of our local Plone development team at IT Services of University of Jyväskylä got to learn how Plone is being developed. They got their contributor agreements submitted to be able to push their patches to upstream, they learned how those patches were made, tested and reviewed in practice, and they got to know many experienced Plone developers in person. Of course, they also got to feel the spirit of an international open source development sprint, from the community with probably the longest continuing tradition on it.

The same was true for Mikko Hursti, a local student attending the sprint while working on a Google Summer of Code project for Plone Foundation. This year only four students from Finland were accepted for Google Summer of Code program. Mikko's project is about implementing a drag and drop user interface for customising content listings on Plone.

During the sprint, our local development team mainly focused on confirming and fixing the issues reported for PloneFormGen on Plone 5. PloneFormGen is the most famous form builder for Plone, used by most of the content editors at our university. Also, its unrivalled flexibility really showcases many of the unique features of Plone CMS. Before the end of the sprint, Jussi Rajala and Valtteri Karppinen submitted at least four related pull requests for it and got very familiar with the large code base in question. Not bad at all for their first sprint.

• https://github.com/plone/Products.Archetypes/pull/93
• https://github.com/plone/Products.Archetypes/pull/94
• https://github.com/smcmahon/Products.PloneFormGen/pull/199
• https://github.com/smcmahon/Products.PloneFormGen/pull/200

Security is one of the most advertised features of Plone CMS. What makes it particularly great feature is that content editors don't really need to know or think about it. It just works. Maik Derstappen made spectacular work at the sprint by cleaning up and fixing the code base for a major security feature of Plone called safe HTML transform. It's a configurable HTML filter, which prevents content editors from accidentally (or with malicious objectives) introducing security issues in their edits. Maik's work guarantees that the feature really works as advertised also on Plone 5. With the new synchronised configuration, it also works better than ever with TinyMCE, the WYSIWYG HTML editor used on Plone.

• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/pull/2098
• https://github.com/plone/Products.PortalTransforms/pull/20
• https://github.com/plone/plone.outputfilters/pull/25

The latest major Plone release, Plone 5, introduced a completely redesigned content management toolbar for all logged-in users. But not all logged-in Plone users are content editors, and when they are not, the new toolbar could a distraction. At the sprint, Peter Holzer continued on earlier work by Jens Klein and introduced Show Toolbar -permission to control when the full toolbar is shown, and an alternative member tools -dropdown menu to show a minimal set of required actions (including logout) for logged-in users when the real toolbar is not shown. The default behaviour, of course, remains unchanged.

• https://github.com/plone/plonetheme.barceloneta/pull/131
• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/pull/2096
• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/pull/2100
• https://github.com/plone/plone.app.upgrade/pull/127
• https://github.com/plone/plone.app.layout/pull/128

Plone 5 was also the first Plone CMS release to ship with a complete multilingual content support. With the bundled Multilingual Support -add-on enabled, Plone supports easy-to-use one-to-one translation of each content page for any language. In addition to fixing some reported issues in it, Peter Holzer and Asko Soukka redesigned its key user interface element, Translate-menu on the toolbar, to be much simpler and more consistent with the other menus in Plone's editing toolbar. With the redesigned Translate-menu soon in place, we really expect to see a good drop in translation related support requests that we currently receive from our content editors.

• https://github.com/plone/plone.app.drafts/pull/6
• https://github.com/plone/plone.app.multilingual/pull/283
• https://github.com/plone/plone.app.multilingual/pull/284
• https://github.com/plone/plone.app.multilingual/pull/285

Plone provides, and has always provided, readable and meaningful web addresses for any content stored on it. Even better, it's really easy to content around on Plone. But what happens to those old web addresses when content gets moved? Correct. Of course Plone keeps track of moved content and maintains a redirection table for them. Unfortunately, until now, the redirection table has been invisible for Plone web masters. Luckily, Stephan Klinger championed to implement the PLIP for adding the missing redirection management UI for Plone, based on the existing (but lacking) RedirectionTool add-on. While Stephan made the most of the work, Asko helped him by implementing paging and filtering for the new redirection management control panel.

• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/commits/plip-1486-redirection

Our farthest participant was Eric Steel, the Plone release manager, who came to the sprint all the way from the United States. Eric started his sprint by releasing the latest beta of Plone 5.1 for developers, but then, together with Philip Bauer, completed the long-awaited refactoring of Plone login forms. The current login forms used in Plone 5 are relying on a form framework, which is no longer used anywhere else in Plone. Upgrading Plone login forms to use the current form frameworks in Plone has been one of many prerequisites for upgrading Plone to Python 3. It's just awesome that this has finally been done, and we cannot wait for being able to customise Plone login forms in a more sustainable way now. In addition, Philip did also fix a few known issues in the in-place content migration from Plone 4 to Plone 5.

• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/2092
• https://github.com/plone/plone.login/commits/master
• https://github.com/plone/plone.app.contenttypes/pull/413

A lots and lots of work was also done to enhance the official Plone documentation at the sprint. To really get an idea, how Plone documentation applies traditional CI practices to ensure high quality documentation, we really recommend watching the presentation that Sven Strack gave us at the sprint. Sven Strack, Paul Roeland and Alexander Loechel worked at least for better tools for building and testing the documentation, better theme for the upcoming Plone 5.1 documentation, better readability of the docs on mobile devices, refactoring robot generated screenshots (helped also by Asko), documentation on developing better documentation for contributing the docs itself and probably much more. In addition, Paul also fixed a few reported accessibility issues on Plone 5 and tested Asko's approach for building Plone themes with Webpack. Alexander used some of his sprint time to mentor his GSOC student Pavithira KC on implementing new add-ons listing for plone.org.

• https://github.com/plone/sphinxtheme.plone/commits/master
• https://github.com/plone/documentation/commits/5.1
• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/commits/robodoc
• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/1619
• https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/pull/2089
• https://github.com/plone/plone.app.layout/pull/126
• https://github.com/plone/plonetheme.barceloneta/pull/130

Other interesting developments at the sprint included Maik implementing sub-templates into bobtemplates.plone, Alexander adding tox based test setup into bobtemplates.plone and Jussi Talaskivi enhancing plone.docker. Once Maik's enhancements for Plone add-on templates at bobtemplates.plone are available, they will allow to make significantly cleaner initial templates and provide sub-template based scaffolding throughout the add-on lifetime. Alexander's examples for tox based test setups pave the way for testing add-ons easily on both Python 2 and Python 3. Jussi clarified documentation on using Plone Docker images (also as a cluster), investigated into slimming Plone Docker images and then researched the remaining issues in installing Plone with pip, the official Python package installer.

• https://github.com/plone/bobtemplates.plone/pull/206
• https://github.com/plone/plone.docker/issues/69
• https://github.com/plone/plone.docker/issues/70

Finally, there was the dream team of Albert Casado, Victor Fernández de Alba and Timo Stollenwerk working on a new CMS user interface and user experience concept called Pastanaga UI. If something makes this project special, it's the team. Timo is expert on test driven development, and experienced Plone entrepreneur, who really knows the challenges on the current CMS market. Victor is expert on Plone as enterprise CMS. He has authored a book on using Plone for intranets, and has managed many hundreds of Plone sites during his prior position at Universitat Politècnica de Cataluny. Albert, of course, is best known for his design of the current Plone 5 default theme called Barceloneta. And the best part: they all have successfully worked together before.

At the sprint, Albert completed many of his earlier designs for Pastanaga UI components and composed a visual style guide to help with the reference implementation and later adaptations. Thanks for Alberts prior experience on Plone, Pastanaga UI simplifies many Plone key features to be easier to use than ever, especially on mobile. All this his available on request until the reference implementation has been completed. Victor and Timo supplemented Albert's work by bootstrapping a ReactJS based reference implementation of the design. Their goal is to complete Plone REST API compatible minimal viable product with the new UI soon, and attract resources for a more complete implementation later. Since the first implementations will be fully JavaScript based, it not yet sure, if Pastanaga UI would be adaptable for the current Plone UI.

• https://github.com/plone/pastanaga

Many of our sprint days started with a presentation on some of the sprinted or otherwise current topics, including a presentation on Pastanaga UI by Timo and Albert. Recordings of those presentations are now publicly available on our Plone based video publishing platform Moniviestin.

Program

While the code is important, Plone sprints are also about the people, who participate them. Plone community has a long tradition for dining or just hanging around together after those very intensive work days, and Midsummer Sprint did not make an exception. We also tried our best to take account that many of the participants travelled with their families.

Most of us dined together every day from Sunday evening to Friday evening. While many of the participants were still arriving on Sunday, we dined at Restaurant Shalimar inside the train station, to be able to welcome travelling participants and their families as they arrived.

In the Monday evening we dined at Restaurant Sohwi, which has always been popular place among the students and staff of our university due to its close proximity to our main campus areas.

On Tuesday, we wrapped up the day a bit earlier than usual and took a guided tour at Alvar Aalto museum (tour being sponsored by the university) to learn and get inspired by Aalto's design. In the evening, we walked a short forest trail at Haukanniemi together, and experienced a beautiful and warm sunset while enjoying a traditional Finnish camp fire with Finnish sausages (and surprisingly without mosquitoes).

In the Wednesday evening we dined together at viking restaurant Harald, where it was possible to enjoy many Finnish delicacies including reindeer, gravlax, Scandinavian rye and malt bread, lingonberries and cheese bread with cloudberries. We were lucky enough to catch the summer discount of the restaurant to make that evening a bit more affordable.

On Thursday, we organised a traditional Finnish sauna evening with street food at Opinkivi Sauna, a private sauna apartment owned by The Student Union of the University of Jyväskylä. Two separate dressing rooms and saunas at Opinkivi Sauna ensured that everyone was able to enjoy Finnish sauna in comfort.

And finally, in the Friday evening, we ended the sprint with the remaining participants by dining together at restaurant Trattoria Aukio, near the harbour of Jyväskylä, and then, said the goodbyes.

Thank you all, and see you soon!

Case Study: Creating a Course Registration System in Short Notice (Jedi Style!)

Here is a nice story, that almost got lost in translation (literally - its published in Finnish last summer).

It was a warm, late afternoon on May 2016, when we at plone-support received a message, asking for help. Perhaps we weren't like Obi-Wan Kenobi on that, but close enough: A customer needed to have a new course registration system and migration from the old one so soon as August 2016. Whoa, three monts, summer coming on and other projects on the road too. Should we just skip it or take the million credits to get even with Jabba?

Well, here's a spoiler alert: https://www.fdpe.fi/

 

1. The case of The Finnish Doctoral Programme in Economics

A Joint Doctoral Programme of the Economics Disciplines of 10 Participating Universities in Finland. The Finnish Doctoral Programme in Economics (FDPE) promotes high-quality doctoral education in economics in Finland by organising systematic and diverse doctoral courses and seminars.

 Here's is a rough translation of the initial email we received in May 2016.

We will need a platform, where we can manage nation wide economics doctoral programmes cooperation. To be more clear: we need a web-based system, that allows students from participating universities to apply for doctoral studies courses from another universities. Ideally the principles of the system would be: 
- Each university inserts a batch of courses as part of the cooperation
- The courses became a course pool, that will be communicated to the studens via the system
- The students from each univeristy may register for the coursers on the course pool
- After a course a teacher may communicate the grade of each student to the student's home university via the system
- Once per year the registrations are gathered and counted, how many participants there are from university x to university y
- Based on those calculations it is possible to settle the compensation between universityes. 

The point is to build a platform to gather registrations and communicate students grades and registration information. The platform should be as simple and robust as possible. 

Our schedule is uncomfortably tight in the sense that the system (or at least te application feature) should be online at latest in August.
****************

Ok, so we got the message. And why they chose to ask us, is because of another Plone-site that shows events and gathers applications there: http://inforte.jyu.fi

We discussed about the case, and thought it was quite a challenge to present so late at spring, (with all the vacations and other projects we had in store for the summer). But we also thought, that we had a quite toolset for this kind of system:

• Plone would take care of the website, permissions, workflows, security and robustness. 
• Courses would be dexterity content types - easy to create and to modify if needed
• The registration form could be easily created using Plone Form Gen add on - of which we had lot's of experience 
• The information about participants could be delivered in the system using plone permission management and intranet features
• This was a good case to try out new Plone 5 and its out of the box responsive layout

So we were set to talk with the customer and see what else they might have in mind.

After a positive meeting, we also had this information:

• Migration was needed, but only for visible content
• The visual desing of the site would be secondary feature
• If only the application forms and course information were online already in August, the rest of system could be finished by September
• We could use HAKA indentity federation service to allow students and staff from different universities to login with their own userid and password. We could have created internal useris's for the admins and could have forced students to insert more information at the application form, but this was way better solution. We had used HAKA before with Plone in many occasions (Like Moniviestin video publishing platform)
• The couldn't use national Opintopolku.fi -service (at least not yet) for doctoral studies. 
• The project had fixed deadline and the customer was willing to prioritize and to focus on the most important features first

So we decided to set out for this venture!

2. Plan B. 

Actually, we had no plan B, so we came up with plan A, to divide the development into clear phases, visible to the customer:

1. At first we would set up a preview-site: the customer could then start using Plone and to learn how to use it. 
2. A light theme customization
3. Site name, domain, certificate and HAKA-federation bureaucracy was set to motion
4. Migration to the old public content (scrape public content)
5. Shibboleth-integration (HAKA) development for Plone 5
6. An event like Course content type would be created
7. Using a Plone Form Gen -solution we had created before on another case to automatically populate basic user information about the person filling the form.  
8. Using a previous solution to generate reports on every separate application form. 
9. A Plone folder, where a teacher stores the saved Excel-files about course grades
10. Other features, like managing permissions,  communication, instructions, planning the application form and theming.

So, we had plans.

Some features, like good security, content management, intranet features,  permission and group management, responsive web design and workflows are built in to Plone CMS. We used the latest Plone 5 version on this case.

The actual work

We started by creating a preview-site in june 2016. This way it was easy for the customer to follow progress. So we added an empty Plone 5 site with minor theming and gave admin permissions to the customer so they could get to know how Plone works. We also did the migration of old public content at this point.

When the migrated content was checked and deemed okay, and the bureaucracy with the domain name done, we published the new site in june 2016 - only without the form functionalities. However, the customer could already do some content editing and checking that everything was okay.

Next up was the HAKA federation. Using HAKA federation, every higher education student in Finland could log in to the site using his/her own user id and password to make logging in easy. At the same time our customer could easily gather the name, email and organisation of every enrolled student. In addition they could add new site administrators from different organizations. Plone allows very fine-grained permission management.

Last, but not least, we developed the registration form and a new content type called Course, with some basic data (start date, end date, information). When a student goes to a course, there is a registration link which opens the form with all necessary fields already populated. The registration form was done using Plone FormGen add on. We had used that add on for over a thousand forms at JYU, so we knew it was stable and customizable.

The registrations were collected to a .csv-table, easy to open in Excel or Google Sheets and easy to use from every organization participating FDPE programme.

In the end we created short instructions for the site admins on how to manage content. The instructions were just Plone pages with some images and links.

Example one: Course Page

Example 2: Registration Form

Summary

The customer was very satisfied with the development and results, and so were we.

This kind of development in this short time period wouldn't have been possible if we didn't have the suitable technology available and knowhow on how to properly utilize it.

Additionally the customer was really cooperative - they focused on getting things done, they did their part on the content and other bureaucracy, and most importantly they knew what to prioritize.

We had limited time and limited resources - and usually it is a good thing if you can actually prioritize and altogether just cut out some features if needed. First things first, and then some.

By using free Open Source components and no need to pay any licence fees, the only thing we (and the customer) needed to focus on, was the actual development.

Now, after almost a year of usage there has been near to none feature requests or incidents using the system, and definitely nothing major. But there have been hundreds of successful registrations and everything seems to be working fine. 

If you want to know more, please contact plone-support@jyu.fi

It is party time!

Plone Mephisto Sprint 2016 Report

Plone Mosaic 2.0 RC has now been released for Plone 5. Similarly to previous releases, you can deploy a demo site of it at Heroku with a single click. Please, join the bug hunt and help with reporting and fixing issues which matter you the most. Please note that Mosaic 2.0 is a major release because it no longer supports for Plone 4.3 (yet, most of the bug fixes could be cherry-picked to 1.0 branch by those who care). The final release will be made once possible migration problems from 1.0 have been solved.

Yes, there was a yet another Plone community sprint. Plone Mephisto Sprint 2016 happened at Leipzig, Germany, from 5th to 9th September, and was focused on improving TTW (through-the-web) experience of customizing Plone sites for better flexibility and hackability. The sprint was organized by Maik Derstappen and it was sponsored by Derico, e-ventis and Plone Foundation. Once the sprint was approved as a strategic sprint by the foundation, enhancing Plone Mosaic became the main target of the sprint.

The participants included Maik Derstappen (derico), Peter Holzer (agitator Weblösungen - BDA), Thomas Massmann (it-spirit), Asko Soukka (University of Jyväskylä), Thomas Lotze, Andreas Jung, Stefania Trabucchi, Jens Klein (Klein & Partner KG - BDA), Christoph Scheid (Uni Marburg), Kristin Kuche (Uni Marburg), Stephan Klinger (der Freitag), Nathan Van Gheem (Windcard Corp), Veit Schiele, Gil Forcada Codinachs (der Freitag), Ramon Navarro Bosch, Michael Töpfl (e-ventis.de) and Christoph Töpfl (e-ventis.de). During the sprint there was also remote participation by Dylan Jay and Rodrigo Ferreira de Souza (Simples Consultoria).

Let's start with some Github Activity statistics collected by Nathan Vangheem from the sprint. During the sprint, at least the following packages were touched with these great numbers:

• plone.app.mosaic (23 PR, 154 commits, 2 outstanding PRs)
• plone.app.blocks (4 PR, 18 commits)
• plone.app.standardtiles (9 PR, 18 commits, 2 outstanding PRs)
• plone.app.tiles (4 PR, 9 commits)
• plone.tiles (2 PR, 16 commits)

Behind those numbers, there was a lot of bug fixes, new issues reported, some refactoring and simplification, few major changes to the foundations of Plone Mosaic, and the long awaited initiative for more complete configuration documentation. Thanks to all the bug fixes, Mosaic Editor and TinyMCE in it will break much less often. Also layout related permission work now as expected. To name the other major fixes and changes to Plone Mosaic, we:

• deprecated dedicated image and attachment tiles in favor of using image and file content types and linking them with rich text tiles as without Mosaic.
• removed complex universal pluggable grid system (tm) implementation in favor of simply using such CSS grid class names that it's possibly to build any current grid system for those class names. This finally makes Mosaic edit and view mode show the same grid by default on Plone 5.
• removed Mosaic Editor from content add forms and introduced a simple add form with just title and description for those content types, which have Mosaic enabled and its layout view defined as their default view. This removes all experienced confusion of add forms some times behaving differently from edit forms and not being able to save images directly inside the new containerish content.
• unified HTML tile implementations and removed dedicated example tiles for headers, lists, etc, in favor of a single rich text tile (which would still allow similar dedicated or templated tiles).
• introduced outline mode for the editor (pressing Alt modifier key while in editor) to keep the default editor experience simple, but still allow more technical look into the layout and make it easier to split the layout into separate rows.
• fixed a major issue where versioning of content with blobs in its tiles' configuration created empty blobs into filesystem. This has been a major issue for collective.cover users and is now fixed with new plone.app.tiles releases (1.1.0 for collective.cover).

In addition

• we fixed a few site layouts related compatibility issues with Plone 5 and added a support for enabling site layouts support with a single line in buildout. Site layouts are not yet enabled by default.
• we implemented a new, but transparent, tile configuration and data storage to mostly avoid using annotation objects with shared content layouts (and be more friendly for ZODB connection cache).
• Michael and Christoph (Töpfl) worked on Rob Gietema's ReactJS based Mosaic Editor experiment, and Ramon started a new Angular 2 based Mosaic Editor experiment. Hopefully at least the other one will succeed to give us a fresh flexbox based layout editor during the next year.
• Maik lead work on example content layout to be shipped with the final Mosaic 2.0 release.
• Andreas started work on allowing custom views for existing content tile.
• Dylan worked on user interface and TinyMCE support for allowing tiles inside rich text tiles.
• Rodrigo worked on refactoring code of RSS and calendar portlets to be easily re-usable with respective tiles.

We also discussed about the path to get Mosaic into Plone core. The current plan is to get Mosaic dependencies into Plone core first (plone.tiles, plone.app.tiles, plone.app.blocks, plone.app.standardtiles), but only PLIP the user interface package (plone.app.mosaic) when it works well enough with the other add-ons shipped with Plone (e.g. multilingual). Unfortunately, no PLIPs were written yet.

A few photos from the sprint are available at Google Photos. In addition to full day sprinting, we did get a city tour around Leipzig and enjoyed Maik's barbequing at the sprint garden. Maik did a great job in organizing the sprint, and I really hope, we made it worth the effort. And as always, the work around Plone Mosaic continues also after the sprint. It's still huge effort left, but while it's still not ready for Plone core, it can already be customized to give real return on investment, as seen in Castle CMS. Finally, Big thanks for everyone participating the sprint. It was a pleasure to work with you, and I hope to see you all again!

Creating flexible and responsive tile-based pages using Plone Mosaic

What is Plone Mosaic?

Plone Mosaic is a new layout solution for Plone CMS. Mosaic, Blocks and Tiles provide a simple, yet powerful way to manage the pages on your Plone website. 

In this article I will give examples on how to create and edit flexible and responsive tile-based pages using Plone Mosaic. I'll also discuss some issues I have so far bumped into, and ponder on the possibility to use Mosaic to replace Portalview, our current tool to compose customized portals. I'll use Plone 5, the newest version of Plone CMS.

• https://github.com/plone/plone.app.mosaic
• Mosaic documentation
• Example page made using mosaic 

Normally a Plone page consists of a title, description and content section. Using Mosaic one can easily create custom layouts and use them as templates for othes pages.

Mosaic editor example

1. How to Create a Mosaic Page

All too easy:

1. Add a new page
2. Select Display -> Mosaic layout
3. Select Basic or Document layout
4. Save

Basically you first have to create a page and then change how the page is viewed - using normal Plone page layout or Mosaic layout. 

2. How to Edit a Mosaic Page 

Mosaic editor on Plone 5

You can still edit normal page properties on the top left corner, but for editing Mosaic layout, there are two menus on the top right corner: Format and Insert.

At first I'll insert a couple of tiles into place. Starting with text tiles is the way to go.

Insert menu

It is easy to drag and drop the tile into a desired place. There can be 1-4 colums side by side. And they are responsive too.

In this example I added two text tiles and an image.

 

Drag and drop the new tile to a desired place.

Image dropped over a text tile

Embedding media works well too using the Embed tile (and Oembed). Just add a media URL.

One thing missing here, though, is the opportunity to change embed size. Quite often the video size is not optimal.

3. Formatting a Mosaic Page

I can quickly drag and drop new tiles to the page, rearrange or delete tiles.

If I want to edit a text tile, I'll just click it and a TinyMCE editor appears:

TinyMCE on Mosaic text tile

The editor has basic editing features, such as:

• Formatting (headers, paragraphs etc.)
• Text alignment
• Bullet lists
• Images
• Links

Occasionally I have missed the opportunity to edit HTML, though.


However, the basic formatting functions on tiles go a long way:

Formatting options

I can change content alignment, add a dark background and add some padding between tiles. Of course this could be done using Plone theming tools too.

Changing the structure of a mosaic page is really easy and it works well - I haven't come across any issues on drag and drop (Using Firefox on OSX).

Replacing Portalview with Mosaic?

One use case for Mosaic when we migrate our websites to Plone 5 could be replacing our multiple portal pages. They are created using our own Portalview composition add on (sorry, only a really old version available!). Portalview contains e.g. the following features:

• Possibility to compose a customised layout (based on folders and other Plone content)
• Image/text/video/page carousel (Yes I know, carousels are evil :)
• Accordions
• Tabs
• Dropdown menu
• Custom CSS!

All can be manipulated in the browser.

An example here:

And another one:

Issues and suggestions

In addition to myself there are couple of users and content managers working with Mosaic. First comments have been positive: "This looks shiny and modern!" More experience we will get next autumn when users begin to create new site for a new faculty at University of Jyväskylä.

"This looks shiny and modern!"

Some issues or suggestions for features so far:

• Selecting between basic and document layout is probably not needed activating Mosaic layout?
• In addition to text tile there are list elements and subheadings - they can be added through text tiles - perhaps not needed as tiles at all?
• No unique ID:s on different tiles - makes it harder to create customised CSS for certain tiles
• TinyMCE doesn't show html view. Could come handy at some cases (embedding an iframe for example)
• Not possible to change embed size.  
• No custom CSS

Overall technically Mosaic is very robust - I haven't come across any errors or technical issues while using it.

However, Mosaic still has some missing features in order to replace Portalview as it is, but luckily:

Plone Mephisto Sprint 2016, Leipzig, Germany, September 5th-9th 2016

Due to power of the awesome Plone open source community, there will be a sprint to develop Plone Mosaic further!

• Mephisto Sprint 2016
• Mosaic Issues