Zope News & Articles

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Plone 3.3 has been released. Like its predecessors 3.2 and 3.1, it represents what Plone (news, site) has called another “minor” upgrade in the 3.x series. And like its predecessors, it focuses on some simple improvements that will make life easier for users.

While there are a number of refinements with 3.3, the one that will create most interest is that a single Plone instance will be able to run any number of sub sites, each with their own look-and-feel.

These sub sites will all come with different navigation, different portlets, separate content for listing pages, separate internal search, separate workflows and permissions and separate user dashboards.

It's been a busy summer for the Plone (news, site) project. In particular, they put out a call for Plone Improvement Proposals (PLIPs) for Plone 4. They also split the initial vision for Plone 4 into a more do-able Plone 4 for this year and a more far-reaching update for Plone 5 slated for next year.

Following the PLIP process, the Plone 4 Framework Team has polished off their list of what's to be included in this release.

The initial vision for Plone 4 was so complex that it wasn't slated for release until 2010. In order to allow for smaller, more focused releases, Plone (news, site) Founder Alexander Limi announced at the Plone Symposium at Penn State that the Plone Roadmap has been revised. What was originally Plone 4 has been split into Plone 4 and Plone 5.

The Plone (news, site) 4 Framework Team has put out a call for Plone Improvement Proposals (PLIPs). PLIPs are necessary for any improvements that are larger than a bug fix and should only be submitted if you either plan to do the coding yourself, or pull together people to write it.

Plone 4 will bring Plone up to date with current technologies, while making it easier to work with for integrators and end users. As this release is meant as an intermediate step toward the radically updated Plone 5, hold any changes that "significantly alter backwards compatibility, visuals or APIs" until then.

Turn in your PLIP submissions by 0700 UTC (3am EDT) on 20 June 2009. To do so, look over previous PLIPs as a guide to what format to use, create a ticket with the type PLIP, and then enter your proposal.

Include information such as:

• Why is the change important?
• How will this change be achieved?
• What downsides are there to this change being adopted?

When it's ready for consideration, set the milestone to 4.0. From there, you will receive feedback from the Framework Team. The team will then vote on submissions and set deadlines for when they must be ready. The code must be complete by the stated deadline to be included in the release.

As we've mentioned previously, the Plone (news, site) community has been in discussions over a slight change to licensing policy. No, Plone is not changing licenses. It's sticking with the GPL.

However, Plone is now also offering the option for those building Plone Framework Components to apply for permission to use a modified BSD license for their components instead of the GPL.

This move is primarily meant to make it easier for componentized Plone code to interact with Zope and Python projects without causing GPL violations. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis for components that:

• Are in the plone.* namespace, not the plone.app.* namespace.
• Don't have imports from GPL-licensed code.

The primary developer/maintainer must be willing to ensure the component won't acquire dependencies on GPL-licensed code.

For the official description of the new policy and associated FAQs, see the Plone Framework Components Relicensing Policy document.

Some might say that over the ten years since the Plone (news, site) project was founded, the Plone community has developed an organizational fetish. However, that fetish has served them well -- leading to 2 Packt Open Source CMS Awards, participation in events like the Google Summer of Code and a worldwide Python-powered following. Here's a look at where the Plone project is today.

Version 3.3 of the Plone web content management system is on its way, and the Plone Foundation is inviting all and sundry to help test during its short beta cycle. Come one, come all, pound on this baby and make it great.

Plone, the sometimes enigmatic open source CMS, has been working hard and planning big changes. The recent wrap up of the 2008 Plone Strategic Planning Summit is proof positive that they are serious about competing in the big world of open source CMS and not getting lost in the mix that is growing rapidly as others pull ahead of the field.

DISCOVER Magazine, one of the most widely read science mags in the US, had out grown its dated web publishing infrastructure. Times were changing, multi-media was big and in general Web and CMS technology had moved forward significantly.

DISCOVER chose the Plone Web content management system as the platform for managing and delivering their primary website (http://www.discovermagazine.com). The decision was made on the basis of the system’s ease-of-use, feature set, strong open source community, outstanding customizability, standards compliance, reputation and delivery performance.

In part one of this two-part series we described both how DISCOVER uses the Plone Web CMS to manage its website, and how the DISCOVER team worked through the process of migrating existing content from its older site into the Plone system.

Here in part two, we will review some of the specific features of Plone and how DISCOVER has taken advantage of them, and then we’ll discuss a bit about the website’s post-launch performance.

After nine months of hard work, the folks at the Plone Team have announced the release candidate build of Plone 3.0, available for all platforms.

Plone, an open source CMS built on the Zope application server, is used by hundreds of professional web sites around the world. This upcoming release is promised to be the most advanced and feature-ridden version of this popular CMS product.