I decided to end my “year in technology” today by taking my first hands-on look at Plone 3.0, schedule for release in March 2007.
Plone 3.0, as its name implies, is shaping up to be a major release for Plone, with a whole pile of big, sexy new features that you’ll notice the second you fire it up. And of course, there’s a whole bunch more going on under the hood. Plone co-founder Alexander Limi gave a great overview of Plone 3.0 at the Plone Conference in October. (You can watch his talk online.) But hearing Alex talk about it was no substitute for the visceral thrill of actually installing Plone 3.0 for the first time and seeing the fruits of the community’s past six months of work.
Disclaimer: Plone 3.0 is still an “alpha” release. That means it’s totally, wildly, insanely not ready for production use. You shouldn’t even think about installing it anywhere near your live sites yet.
As the roadmap shows, Plone 3.0 is very focused on improving the daily content editing experience for end users. Plone 3.0 comes on the heels of Plone 2.5, which introduced some big new chunks of internal plumbing powered by new Zope 3 technologies, and is the first release of Plone that really starts to use these new capabilities to push new features out to end-users.
KSS - Ajax for Plone
The most significant new feature is undoubtedly KSS — “Kinetic Style Sheets” — or, Plone’s Ajax framework. This allows Plone to have a more polished user interface elements and more powerful dynamic applications that can refresh data in a page without having to reload the entire page. For example, you can double-click the title of the page to instantly edit it. Or switch between tabs nearly instantly. Or validate form fields before you hit “submit.” And that’s just the beginning.
Godefroid Chapelle and Balazs Ree have done amazing work to turn KSS into a powerful but simple-to-use framework. I can’t wait to see what Plone developers and UI designers are going to be able to do with these newfound capabilities.
Versioning, Staging and Locking
Plone 3.0 now provides document versioning out of the box. Versioning allows you to save old versions of a page, compare your current version to older versions, and even to roll back to previous versions. Plone 3.0’s versioning is drawn from CMFEditions, the well-established add-on Product. Plone 3.0 is also scheduled to include document staging, the ability to work on a copy of a document while the old version is still live, via Kapil Thangavelu’s product “iterate.” Finally, Plone 3.0 includes locking, which prevents two people from making changes to a document at the same time. Together, versioning, staging and locking will make Plone 3.0 very appealing to folks who are managing sophisticated sites with multiple people editing content at the same time.
A New Portlets Engine
The third massive improvement in Plone 3.0 is a brand new engine for managing portlets. Previous versions of Plone have lacked an easy-to-use interface for controlling which portlets appear where. And even if you did manage to stumble through the ZMI to the right spot, the amount of control you could exercise was pretty limited.
With “plone.portlets“, Martin Aspeli, Dorneles Treméa, Christof Haemmerle and Geir Bækholt have radically redefined how portlets are managed in Plone. Site administrators are going to be completely blown away by this. Just click the new “manage portlets” link in the right or left column of the page, and you get a brand-new screen that allows you to:
- instantly add, remove and reorder portlets
- control whether portlets get inherited from parent folders
- customize portlets per-user, per-group or per content type
- control the number of items in listing portlets
No More Broken Links
Don’t you hate it when you delete or move a piece of content in your site, forgetting that you’ve got other pages that link to it? Plone 3.0 now includes a brand-new feature for automatically detecting, preventing and redirecting broken links within your Plone site. Martin Aspeli and Andi Zeidler have again done some incredible work to prevent “link integrity” problems before they bite. Plone now:
- warns you when you try to delete a page that has incoming links from elsewhere on your site
- automatically create redirects when you move or rename a page that has incoming links
Unfortunately, Plone can’t yet automatically find broken external links — doing that kind of intensive web crawling turns out to be a huge performance drain. But you can always use external tools such as Xenu Link Sleuth to find those.
But Wait, There’s More!
All of these features are merged and ready to go right now. But there’s more stuff that is scheduled to get rolled in. I’ll probably jinx it by writing about it, but some of the highlights include:
- New default workflows suitable for simple sites and intranets
- New “reader” and “editor” roles, which will also be really useful for intranets
- Out of the box support for full-text indexing of Word, PDF and Excel documents, eliminating the need for add-on Products to do this
- Wiki-style linking — just enclose stuff [[in double brackets]] to create new links!
Want to know more? You can read the roadmap for all the details. Or you can check out the Plone Framework Team email list archives to follow the process of merging and testing all of these new features.
Jon Stahl: My First Hands-On Look at Plone 3.0
Originally from Planet Plone by